(gentle music) (gentle music) - Reports that American democracy is dying are greatly exaggerated, so say those who admit our great experiment may be battered and bruised, but it can still be saved.

But others say the shining city on the hill has gone dark and our democracy is already on life support.

Here to tell us what they think is a distinguished bipartisan panel: Anne Applebaum, staff writer for the Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian; Michelle Goldberg, columnist for the New York Times; Will Hurd, former Republican Congressman and author of "American Reboot: An Idealist's Guide to Getting Big Things Done"; Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut; and George Packer, staff writer for the Atlantic and author of the "Last Best Hope: Crisis and Renewal in America".

And we're grateful to have all of you with us.

Anne, I'm going to start with you.

For some time, you've been writing with some urgency about democracy being under threat around the globe.

In fact, I've heard you say really bluntly that autocrats are winning.

Are autocrats winning here in America?

- They aren't winning yet, but they could.

One of the things that's disturbed me over the last few months and years is the degree to which some of the things happening inside American democracy resemble what's happened in democracies or in former democracies that I've lived in or spent time in around the world.

The growing polarization, the way in which people on both sides of the divide don't just think one another are opponents, but think one another are traitors, or evil, or dangerous.

The undermining of institutions, the attack on the voting process, these are all things that have happened before, in other times, in other places.

You've seen them in Chávez's Venezuela, you've seen them in Orban's Hungary.

These are known signs that democracy is in trouble.

- I'll just ask you point blank.

How troubled are you at this point in time with the direction in which the United States is heading?

- I'm very troubled.

That doesn't mean that we're doomed, or that there's some kind of downward chute that we're in that we can't get out of.

One of the mistakes that people often make about history and this is true of our own country too is they assume that the history has a progressive arc.

As the famous saying goes, we're on the arc of history and therefore good things will happen or else, we're heading in a direction that can't be stopped.

I mean, really what happens tomorrow depends on what we do today.

There is no -- Nothing is inevitable.

There are no rules.

There are no laws of history so we can stop what's happening, or we can change it by our actions now.

But Americans should know that many of the things happening in our country would cause us enormous alarm if we saw them happening somewhere else.

- Michelle, when you made your debut column for the New York Times back in 2017, you said we were entering a period of minority rule.

And in reflecting on that and where we are now, how do you think that's impacted democracy here?

- I mean, to me, that's the other side of the crisis that Anne was talking about.

Anne is talking about political dynamics that are happening all over the world.

We're seeing this rise with authoritarian populism in many, many different contexts.

The part of it that is unique to America is certain functions of our constitutional system that at this point, I think of them as like a boa constrictor, that they're kind of strangling the life out of democracy.

But no offense, the Senate, which is completely...

It's not just that it's completely dysfunctional, that it was already a counter majoritarian institution that's now because, of the routine use of the filibuster, become radically counter majoritarian.

The Supreme court, gerrymandering, which means that Republicans are likely to do quite well in the midterms.

Even if a majority of citizens in these states votes for Democrats, they're not going to take the state legislatures.

And what you're seeing is that Republicans are using their dominance in all of these institutions.

The Supreme Court's a perfect example, their kind of attack on voting rights to further entrench minority rule.

And it's getting harder and harder for me to see sort of how democracy and our constitution are going to continue to coexist.

- I think you've done the whole show in that statement.

- Actually, - Okay, bye.

- we're going to go on to Will at this point because Senator Mitt Romney addressed a group of donors at a private event and talked about how concerned he was about the frailty of democracy.

And in fact, he references this chart.

I don't know, maybe Senator Murphy's seen it in his office that tracks civilizations back 4,000 years.

And the default setting at the end is autocracy.

Now, concern is one thing, how worried are you, Will, about the state of the democracy right now?

- Worried but hopeful that things could still get better.

I'm thankful that we have great historians like Anne Applebaum that's talking about what's happening in other places around the world in order to give us context.

But democracy has always been fragile.

It always will be fragile.

And the thing that we can't do is take it for granted.

And yes, you have redistricting or gerrymandering.

This is something that it's all become about incumbent protection.

And this is happening, whether you're in Illinois or Texas.

And whoever's in power is pushing those issues.

But for me, the concern is our political continuum is no longer a line.

It's a horseshoe.

And the lunatic edges are closer to each other than they are to the middle.

And I think the way we get out of this is we have to have more people participating in voting in primaries.

Most of the primaries in the United States of America for this cycle is over.

There's still some.

But in 2024, if we want to have better options in November, that means whether you're a Republican Democrat or Independent that you get engaged in the primary system because that's where we have too few people voting.

- At this point, let me ask you, Chris, because you've described democracy as I think a fragile port within a raging storm and battering winds.

A lot of weather stuff going on here.

Battering winds could actually just knock out democracy.

Are the winds getting stronger?

- Well, listen, I think we've always been a fragile port.

This is an exceptional moment in human history where we have decided to govern our lives through a democracy in which we all have a say.

Mitt Romney is right that 0.001% of human beings have lived in a community in which they have a say equal to those 10 times as powerful or as wealthy as them in what happens in their community.

And so we should accept this as abnormal.

We should accept this as a 250-year experiment.

But listen, as we speak, President Biden is on his way to a -- to a series of accomplishments through our current, very broken, fragile democracy that may go down as the most significant in any sort of early presidency.

Many of these accomplishments will be achieved through Democrats and Republicans actually coming together, whether it be the gun law, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act.

And so I agree with Will, I think this is a fragile moment.

I agree with Anne that we are certainly sitting in a global context that we have to deal with.

But I also can look at the level of achievement that's happening right now.

I can look at the seven different bipartisan bills that passed during the COVID epidemic to save millions of lives and small businesses all across the country and tell you that this experiment still can work.

And there's plenty of evidence that it is not fundamentally broken beyond repair.

- George, you feel strongly that our animating spirit of equality has dissipated or disappeared, and that's a big part of what we're going through.

- We've never been equal.

It's always been a word, an ideal, a desire.

Tocqueville called it the indefatigable passion of Americans is to be as good as anyone else.

That's what he was struck by when he came here in the 1830s from aristocratic France and saw the first democratic society he'd ever seen in which everyone felt that they ought to be able to do anything, or to enter any world.

Of course, in the 1830s, there was slavery, women couldn't vote, et cetera.

What I see, going back to Tocqueville, is that without a sense that equality is possible, self-government breaks down in this country.

Without the shared citizenship that comes from a sense of being equal citizens, we have no other bond.

We don't have blood and soil and shared memories.

We have the sense of being equal citizens.

And without it, self-government breaks down.

And for Tocqueville, self-government was like a skill that you had to learn and you could easily unlearn it, forget it.

And I think we've lost that skill partly because in the last half century, we've become so radically unequal to the extent that we haven't seen since the Gilded Age that large numbers of Americans feel that they have, that they are second class or third class, and that to get into the good life is impossible for their children.

And that's been a trend we've seen with the de-industrialization, the economy, the rise of the knowledge economy, the rise of Wall Street as the power that controls economy, and also with the rise of the unwhitening of America with mass immigration, with Black rights, with the rights of minority groups that have been disenfranchised until now or until recently.

So two things happening, one greater and greater inequality, and the other, the first truly multiracial, multicultural democracy we've had.

Those two things have created a sense of alienation among large numbers of Americans who decided that they were ready to throw in their lot with a demagogue.

And that to me is the story of how we got Donald Trump.

- Have you gotten less optimistic about this democracy?

- Of course.

And let's look at it from two levels.

I just described what I think of as the level at which ordinary citizens are feeling alienated from the institutions of democracy.

There's also the level of elites who have either sort of seceded into their wealth, into their privilege, or use this institutions and the systems to ensure those privileges, whether it's economic or political in my world, the media.

And so ordinary people feel that those important institutions are essentially rigged for the benefit of a handful of insiders.

That's something I saw everywhere I went when I was writing my previous book, "The Unwinding", a common view that the system was rigged against ordinary people and that the middle class was therefore disappearing.

And without that, I think you have a kind of rage that's constantly boiling under the surface and then comes up at key moments.

- And in your book, "Twilight of Democracy", you actually go to what Michelle's talking about a little bit in the sense that, for example, the Republican Party in going from the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan to the despair and the apocalyptic vision of Donald Trump was a real reset.

And now, you mentioned Viktor Orbán, I think, in the beginning.

The Republican Party sees him an autocrat as a model for how they think things should be done.

What do you think?

- So Orbán is somebody who, like Trump, used culture wars in order to win elections.

In other words, he actually moved away from the economic issues that George was talking about and got people not to focus on those, but instead to focus on perceived threats to their identity, whether it came from what he would call gender ideology, or whether it came from immigration.

He focused people on those kinds of problems in which he could divide the country in such a way that he would always win the argument.

And he actually crowded out other issues, issues of economic change, and reform, and equity and so on.

And that's something that the Republican Party has also done very well by getting people to focus on culture issues that are designed and packaged in order to make them angry.

And sometimes, as Senator Murphy was saying, some of the things that are happening are good.

I mean, we passed a huge infrastructure bill, which was something that Trump talked about for four years and never managed to do.

There will be improvements all over the country in all kinds of places.

But I was speaking not that long ago to somebody who's responsible for implementing that bill, and he was saying how difficult it is to get not just media, but even ordinary people to focus on the reality of economic change around the reality of investment, here's something that's being done for your good, because people are focused often in different directions.

They're focused on cultural issues and online arguments that are designed to polarize them and make them angry.

I think that's what the Republican Party saw that Orbán was good at.

And they also saw that he was somebody who was good at altering the political system, including the voting system.

By the way, gerrymandering isn't something that happens only in the United States.

But altering the voting system, altering the political system so that his party would never lose.

So the admiration for Orbán is for somebody who's managed to get to power and hold power by altering the institutions by changing the nature of democracy.

And actually, my greatest fear about a second Trump presidency would be that, that he would do this time now that more people around him understand that this is possible, that the plan would be to alter the civil service to alter the voting system, to alter the judicial system in ways that would make it impossible for anybody else to ever win again.

And that is a danger.

As I said, it was accomplished in Hungary.

It was accomplished in Turkey, It was accomplished in Venezuela.

There are other people trying to accomplish it in other places.

So it's not unique to the United States.

- Well, I'm going to quote somebody.

I don't want to sound like we're beating up on the GOP here, but I have to ask you about something that Steven Levitsky who's a co-author of "How Democracies Die" wrote, which was he said that initially, when they wrote the book back in 2017, Republicans were kind of headed in a direction, but now he sees them as an anti-democratic force.

Now, do you think that that's harsh?

What do you think it is when you hear that?

- Well, there are some elements of the Republican Party that is moving the party towards authoritarianism, but saying, I always get frustrated when people use the broader Republican Party.

Who are we talking about?

So yes, these things are problems, but to say that that is reflective of the entire party, yes, it is scary that some of our senior leaders.

And we always want to focus some of this on Trumpism.

I think Trumpism is too narrow.

And I'm glad we're having this conversation around authoritarianism because that's the broader part we of the Republican Party that we have to be concerned with.

I would boil this down to concentration of power in the hands of the few is always a bad thing.

I think the far right wants it concentrated in an individual.

I think the far left wants it concentrated in institutions.

Neither one of those things work.

And as Chris has pointed out, we alluded to already, there have been times when this thing has worked.

And so trying to dumb these things down to the entire party believes one way or not is problematic.

- All right.

Everybody wants to talk at one time.

Go ahead if you would, George, quickly.

- I used to think that that was true.

But after January 6th, what I learned was the real problem was not the people who went to the Capitol to overthrow democracy.

It wasn't Steve Bannon.

It wasn't Roger Stone.

The real problem was the Republicans who were too cowardly to stand up to them.

Maybe they did it for a day, maybe for a week, but bit by bit, the entire leadership of the Republican Party at the national level and state by state collapsed in the face of the greatest threat to our democracy since the civil war.

So for me, that's a sign, whether it's malice, cowardice, some mix of the two, authoritarianism is at the heart of the Republican Party, either by omission or commission.

And it will not be purged, I'm sorry to say, until the party experiences a series of defeats.

The authoritarian Republican Party experiences electoral defeat not once, but several times and begins to change because it realizes that the voting public won't accept it.

- Chris, I want to ask you because people always ask me.

When you see Chris Murphy, does he talk about the fact, the wall of silence, the GOP wall of silence, and whether that's just impermeable, whether that exists in the cloak room, whether that exists in the gym, whether it exists in the dining room?

It's hard to understand how people can watch what's gone on in this country, I don't care what party you are, what ideology you are, and not have some reaction.

- I think there's a conversation happening out in the American public today whether democracy is still worth it any longer.

Democracy is inefficient.

Autocracies are more efficient today than they were 50 years ago.

You look at certain authoritarian countries and they are growing.

They are pulling people out of poverty.

In some cases, they're managing crises better than democracies are.

And so this deal that we used to have that in exchange for a more inefficient system, you get to participate in a government that is ultimately going to put you first.

I think a lot of people are wondering whether that's true any longer because people's lives are just overwhelming today.

They are angry.

They are fearful.

But more than anything, they're just exhausted.

They are exhausted by having to manage all of these new, confusing inputs into their lives and into their children's lives.

They're exhausted by a pandemic.

They're exhausted by the lack of mobility for their children.

And so they look at this whole experiment and just wonder whether it's worth it any longer.

And if we don't have an answer for that, if we don't sort of give people power back in their personal lives and their economic lives, then there's nothing that any one individual actor can do to stop a demagogue from coming along and saying, "This system is not working.

I alone can fix it."

That call has worked time and time again throughout human history.

And it will work here if we don't get serious about that lack of power that people feel in their lives.

- Ever since you witnessed, I'm switching gears intentionally here, you witnessed the carnage of 20 murdered children and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School 10 years ago.

And you went out and you made gun safety your life's work, it's your mission.

And so I don't know if it was the morning after, it was shortly after the Uvalde school shooting, you went on the floor of the Senate, and you stood up, and you basically said what a lot of us think very often about what's happening in this country.

We're going to take a look at that right now.

- What are we doing?

Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate?

Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?

What are we doing?

Why are you here?

This only happens in this country and nowhere else.

Nowhere else do little kids go to school, thinking that they might be shot that day.

Nowhere else do parents have to talk to their kids as I have had to do about why they got locked into a bathroom and told to be quiet for five minutes, just in case a bad man entered that building.

Nowhere else does that happen except here in the United States of America, and it is a choice.

It is our choice to let it continue.

What are we doing?

So this was my theory that on a question as existential as the safety of your kids, you undermine faith in democracy if it can't rise to the occasion.

This is what I was talking about in my previous answer to your question.

There are these things happening in our world today that are overwhelming to American families, and one of them is the safety of their communities, right?

It just is so shattering to think that you have to worry about your child's safety when you send them to school.

And so when democracy can't rise to the occasion, when democracy can't do anything about a problem that big, of course, people start to doubt the efficacy of the entire enterprise.

- And it only took nearly 30 years to get a piece of gun safety legislation through that the majority of American people clearly indicate they're in favor of.

And this is bipartisan, this is not just one party.

So it does beg the question, what are we do...

I mean, what sustained you?

- Well, I mean, it's the parents, and the survivors, and the kids is what sustained me.

But this is to Michelle's point.

Why did it take 30 years?

Well, it took 30 years in part because we have a broken system of political change in this nation, which the incumbents, the status quo have far too much power, often exercised secretly without accountability.

And the rules are rigged against people getting their wish.

They elect majorities to the senate, and the house, the president who believe in a policy and they still can't get what they want because we have this system of minority rules.

- All right, I want to give Will a chance.

Will, technically yes, have you broken with the Republican Party?

- Well, I'm still a Republican.

Do I disagree with the Republican Party?

Yes, of course, right?

- Okay, all right.

All right.

- I reflect my own opinions.

And so, yeah, so I have no problem disagreeing with folks that also identify at the same party.

But here's the other thing we got to remember.

We're talking about all these things, but Democrats are still going to lose this election cycle.

Democrats still lost in 2020.

The number of people that if Donald Trump would have maintained the same level of parity that Republicans down-ballot got in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in a couple of other places, he would've still been president of the United States.

There's were people that voted ultimately for Joe Biden and then vote for other Republican down-ballot 'cause they don't like the direction where the Democratic Party was going.

And so if all of these things are true, and I'm not disagreeing with it, why aren't Democrats still not being able to get good grounds?

And it's not just because of gerrymandering and the filibuster.

It's got to look inside themselves.

And are they advocating for the majority of Democrats that believe in the democratic party?

And look, I look at what Chris and John Cornyn did on gun violence was important.

And again, Senator Murphy, I don't want to speak for you, but you got a lot of grief from folks on your side because it didn't go far enough.

And John Cornyn got a lot of grief from folks on his side by saying, "I can't believe you're doing this."

And so this is a step and you got to have more steps.

And the problem is the majority of elected officials are driven by only focusing on a minority of their voters in the party.

And if you go back to last non-presidential election 2018, 92% of house seats were decided in the primary.

And those primary elections were decided by less than 3% of the population.

- I'd like to, at this point, Anne, talk to you though about...

I mean, in terms of Americans' faith in their institutions, there's been a hole punched in our institutions by people running them down to people don't trust them anymore.

And I want to ask you in terms of around the world the way the smear campaign against basically our elections has changed the way we're seeing, how the insurrection has changed the way we're seeing.

All of this erodes people's confidence, obviously.

Do you think that that's irrevocable?

Do you think we can ever get our reputation in terms of being...

I don't want to go as far as saying the shining city on the hill back, but I mean, in terms of the way the elections are being held in this country.

What do you hear?

- So I wanted to say two things.

One was in response to something that Will Hurd just said.

The attack on American institutions isn't only coming from the right.

There's a part of the left, not necessarily in politics, but in academia and elsewhere that also attacks the American idea, American institutions.

Well, I don't want to say that there's some kind of even balance between these two groups.

They haven't helped inspire younger people.

They haven't got people on board.

There's a reason why younger people aren't voting.

And there's a reason why people are disillusioned with some Democrats.

And I think that's an important part of the story as well.

As to the international story, I mean, I think there's in fact a deeper connection between American foreign policy and American democracy than we used to think.

We used to assume that Americans, we acted on behalf of democracy around the world as a sort of charitable project.

We're doing nice things for the Europeans by protecting from the Soviet Union and so on.

Increasingly, I think that there's a deep link between the health of our democracy and the way that we think about democracy internationally.

I'm actually very cheered by the Biden administration's very forthright support for Ukraine and for Ukrainian democracy.

I think that's had a big positive impact, both on the perceptions of the United States around the world, but also I think on Americans' perceptions of themselves.

We're used to thinking of ourselves as standing for that, standing for democracy and standing for the rights of countries like Ukraine to have their own sovereign democracy.

And I think one of the mistakes made by the Trump administration, but also to some extent, the Obama administration was not to understand how central this idea is to Americans' idea of ourselves and who we are.

- George, is it a myth that there was a collective, a shared vision of a country?

- Never, never.

- There was never a shared, right?

- Politics is a competition of narratives always.

And so what we see today is an extension of what we've always had.

But what we have today is a competition of narratives that see each other as existential threats, that cannot tolerate coexistence, cooperation, compromise because to do so is to compromise with evil.

And once you reach that point, then you have to hold onto power or else your America, your way of life, whatever you want to call it is going to be threatened.

And that's why our political elites have, in some ways, broken all their norms.

They've gotten rid of all the restraints.

I wanted to ask Senator Murphy whether you've seen this over your years in the Senate, the willingness to do things that used to just not be done, the lack of self-restraint on the part of politicians who could do them, but didn't do them because they knew it would destroy the ability to actually function as a democracy.

And now, it seems they will do anything to hold onto power.

- So the first moment of the Trump campaign of the Trump presidency is him riding down the escalator, right?

Laughable, right?

Everybody thought it was this wonderful joke.

And yet it was so intentional because from the very beginning, he is choosing to do everything different than every political elite that you have ever seen before.

And what's ironic is that when you look at those two Americas you're describing, the America yearning for justice, the sort of white patriarchal America, they both have this disdain for elites, right?

They both share with them.

They both share together a belief that whether it be the technology elites, the Wall Street elites, the political elites, the academic elites, - The media elites.

- the media elites, that they have all failed the country.

And so the question is whether there is some commonality between those two, I think, driving political forces in America today, and whether there is an ability to start to stitch pieces of those coalitions together around an agenda that actually does seek to move power from elites back to others.

Right now, I think folks don't see that enough from the democratic party.

Trump claims that he's taking on elites, but offers nothing that actually substantively moves the dynamics of power around.

And so if you want to be hopeful, and I choose to be hopeful, that there is maybe an ability to take those two pieces of current American power at the grassroots and find commonalities.

- Will, that's what you're charged with doing.

You're trying to find, you believe that there's... Again, it sounds like a walking hallmark card, but it's a wonderful sentiment really that there's more that unites us than divides us.

You grew up with a Black father and a white mother.

I've heard you interviewed, talking about how you saw the discrimination that they faced.

And now, we have a situation where voting rights are under attack.

I mean, there's just no two ways about it.

The vote is being suppressed in a lot of places.

19 states have passed 34 laws in the last year alone, and there are hundreds more in the pipeline waiting to be passed.

So when you see that sort of thing happening, and you're trying to find common ground with people, how do you reconcile it?

- Well, look, so let's start with... Let me be clear.

We should make it easier to vote, not harder, right?

We should be able to use technology to register online.

We should be able to register close to election day.

More states need to be like my home state and have two weeks of early voting from 8:00 to 8:00 and on the weekends, not just one day of voting.

The problem in a place like Texas in our last primary in March, only 3 million people voted, a 1.2 million Democrats, 1.8 million Republicans.

That's out of 27 million people.

That turnout is terrible.

I actually believe it is because we're not providing something for the majority of those voters that come out and pull a lever for.

And that's part of the problem.

But yes, we should be making it easier to vote and not harder.

But the broader question... And look, I spent time in Ruby-Red Districts and Deep-Blue Districts.

I say the same thing.

And this is how I know this statement about way more unites us than divide this because everybody agrees on all of those things that leads us to improving the quality of life for the people that we live, we love, and being able to put food on our table and a roof over our head.

- Michelle, what Will's saying has merit, but then we look at what we're doing to ourselves and how we're shooting ourselves in the foot in this country.

I will mention to you because I know that you were a reproductive freedom and abortion rights activist at a very young age when you were 13.

And you're rolling back rights in this country.

You're taking away constitutional rights.

You're eviscerating rights.

I mean, in terms of our place in the world, that's another thing.

I mean, how does that speak to where we are in this country?

- I mean, I think it does impact our place in the world.

You saw recently how many heads of state condemned the Dobbs decision.

I think that, I think there's always a connection between illiberalism, authoritarianism, and the rollback of women's rights.

People see the growing equality of the sexes as a sign of something destabilizing, something chaotic.

And so I think that there's always this sense among authoritarians that it's about reasserting traditional hierarchies, including traditional gender hierarchies.

So part of the reason, I think, that people around the world are so alarmed by what's happening here with abortion rights is that they see it as it's both an injustice in itself, but it's also a symbol of something bigger, right?

It's a symbol of a country that was once known for freedom becoming substantially less free in all kinds of ways.

- Right.

George.

- You know what we haven't talked about is the constitutional crisis that will be with us in two years because in addition to voter suppression laws, we have a tremendous effort around the states to fill the offices that will oversee the next presidential election with people who are willing to deny the will of the voters.

And we're seeing all kinds of ways.

We may even see a Supreme Court ruling next term that says state legislatures are the only arbiters of who is the winner of a presidential election in that state and will send their own electors, which of course is what Trump wanted to do after the 2020 election.

So we're headed for a crisis that, I think, is the greatest likely instigator of violence.

If we see state elections or a national election state by state overthrown by state legislators, by secretaries of state, by local precinct executives, and the voters feel rightly that their will has been denied, at the same time, there are a lot of fixes that are kind of structural.

But I think what we haven't talked about today is education, which I think is the only essential long-term fix for our loss of the skill of self-government as Tocqueville called it.

And education.

Last year, we watched these school board meetings in which half the parents were enraged over the supposed trespasses of the other half on each side.

And they were arguing over things that on both sides, I think, were lowering the standard of education.

And ordinary parents who didn't have a stake in the ideological fight simply saw two sets of ideologically motivated parents who were determined to lower standards of education even further.

So one thing we really need to talk about and think about as Americans is how do we restore education as a way for young people to grow up and be capable of governing themselves?

Because right now, it seems all the trends are away from that.

And I see both sides, the Democrats and the Republicans using schools to act out various skirmishes in the culture wars that in the end, the real victims are the kids who suffered enough during COVID and shouldn't have to suffer because their parents and their elected officials have lost themselves in a fever dream of culture wars.

- Sequel to this show, education.

That's a tall, a tall, tall order.

- Well, the problem is the catastrophe is near, the solution is long and slow because we waited so long to address the things that ail our democracy.

And so I fear that we're out of sync in those two lines.

- Well, Chris Murphy will tell you that thanks to a bipartisan panel, at least one thing has been shored up and that is the Electoral Count Act, which was manipulated during the insurrection, in attempt to overthrow the election.

Explain what the new improved version, and this is important, is going to do.

- Yeah, there's some hope in that a group of Republicans and Democrats, probably enough to get this legislation passed through the senate and the house later this year has come up with a rewrite to the 1887 law that governs how a president is selected.

And what it does is put up a bunch of new barriers to fraudulent electors being sent to the electoral college, but it can't eliminate that threat.

If individual actors, governors, federal judges, the congress are all aligned between putting an office, the loser of the 2024 election, there's no law that can stop that from happening.

We just make that a lot less likely to happen.

And just one quick comment that maybe covers a lot of what we're talking about here.

I mean, it is important to remember that this country has just been a rolling series of constitutional crises, right?

We have always had moments where we were having real difficult conversations about the nature of the balance of power between the court and the legislature, or back in 1887, how we select presidents.

We have always been embroiled in controversies over how we treat new immigrants to this nation, how we redefine who we are.

What's happening today with Latinos is not fundamentally different than what happened with prior waves of immigrants to this country.

And so none of that is to excuse our failure to come to some common understanding of our constitutional order, none of that is to excuse the discrimination that is still visited upon far too many people in this country.

But as we have this conversation about whether democracy is dying or not, it's important to remember that there have been lots of other moments in our relatively short history in which many of the same problems we're facing today have pretty clear mirrors.

- We talked to John Meacham about this subject because it feels like it's the worst it's ever been, the civil war not withstanding.

And I think that what's different now is that people, this is personal now.

Your political ideology becomes a reason for somebody to automatically make assumptions about you.

I'm not saying everybody does it, but a lot of people do it.

There's real animosity, and, and I'm, hatred almost for people you don't even know based on what their political affiliation might be.

Are you disagreeing?

- I think what we're experiencing now is maybe unique in the modern era, but not unique in the history of this country.

I mean, if you look at the time around World War I and right after where you had people being, right wing citizen militias on the one hand, people being rounded up and deported for their political beliefs on the other, the tarring and feathering of union activists.

It's not as if partisan and ideological hatred is a new theme in American politics.

I think one of the things that's new is that you're so aware of...

I mean, a lot of these fights over like school boards that George was talking about.

If the San Francisco School Board does something stupid, or does something that seems sanctimonious and irrational, it's no longer just a San Francisco story.

It's something that kind of, Because it's so present, people feel like it's happening all over the place.

I wrote a column once that we should actually all know a lot less about each other.

There was this hope that by knowing more about each other, people would become more empathetic and open-minded 'cause that's sort of how it happens in real life.

The more you travel, the more you see the three dimensionality of things, but online, I think it's really the opposite.

I mean, I think the problem is less that we're in silos, only speaking to each other, and there's some social science research to back this up, that the more you're exposed to people online with different views, the more insane they seem to you, and the more you feel like you're living in a kind of constant state of crisis and dessolution.

Disillusion, sorry.

- And out of the wealth of wonderful things that you've said, my absolute favorite thing is that democracy is not like tap water; it won't necessarily always be there.

And you raised the whole issue, which I think again resonates with a lot of people.

It's actually, in some ways, like climate crisis.

People aren't sure it exists.

They don't think it can happen.

They don't think anything bad's going to happen.

They don't think they can make a difference.

And those things can really be said of how people look at our democracy.

I mean, it's a big issue.

So what do you tell people who say that, "I can't really have any kind of impact on this"?

- I tell people to focus on their own local communities and what they can do with the people and the issues immediately around them.

Whether it's your local community, whether it's your local co-op, whether it's your local village, or your town, or your city, being more involved in those things will help you have those institutions and bodies come to more rational solutions and have better conversations.

I mean, a lot of this isn't even about which solution you come to.

It's about a better conversation.

It's about how people talk to each other.

George spoke about Tocqueville a few minutes ago.

One of the things that he observed about Americans was that they were good at democracy because they practiced democracy.

And by that, he meant that they engaged in whatever it was, local church, construction funds, or local committees to help the poor, or local bridge building groups, or local sports clubs, that Americans were involved in all kinds of organizations and institutions at a very, very basic and low level, and through doing that, became better at negotiating and dealing with people they disagreed with at higher levels.

And we really lost that lower level of involvement and engagement partly because so much of it has shifted online and become something else, partly because people think they don't have time, and partly because as you said, people had come to treat democracy like tap water.

Just this thing you go to the election once every four years, and you vote, and you don't really have to do anything else.

And then there are some people who are experts, and those are the politicians, and they worry about these things for the rest of us.

Actually, democracy isn't like this.

It's like water from the well, and you have to go and get it and do things, and think about it, and be engaged in it.

That's the way to fix democracy, and it's also the way to fight this feeling of helplessness.

- A fabulous introduction to the last part of this show.

We are almost out of time.

So Will, I'm going to ask you.

It's been suggested that you might be a contender in 2024.

And so my question to you is if you ran, if you won, what would you do that sort of carries out the themes in your book, "American Reboot", to try and fortify democracy?

- Well, look, I would implement a simple formula.

Freedom leads to opportunity, opportunity leads to growth, growth leads to progress.

I think George started off, we talked about education.

We have income inequality in the United States of America because we have education inequality.

This should be our single most, most focus, and not just the content that we're providing our young kids, but also making sure that half of teenagers don't feel scared about going to school.

We can get back to a having a actual civilized competition of ideas to have the best issues come forward.

And so part of this is talking to a group of people that haven't been talked to before, that the people that don't follow politics like it's a sport, the people that aren't on their Twitter feeds 30 minutes every hour, the people that don't have the cable news on in the background wherever they are.

It's getting back to solving real problems.

And by solving problems, that's how you start bridging that trust gap that exists between the public and their institutions.

- George, you wrote very eloquently about the fact that the war in Ukraine and the bravery of the Ukrainian people actually was one of the brilliant, miraculous moments when people, when the world, a lot of the world, not all of the world, but in this country pulled together.

Talk about that synergy.

- When you think of the moments when we might have come together and stayed somewhat together as Americans, the pandemic, global warming, on and on, and never in fact became more divided as a result of those crises.

The one issue that seems to have held as a uniting force has been the war in Ukraine.

And the percentages of Republicans and Democrats remain very high in support of arming Ukraine.

It's gone down a bit on the Republican side with inflation and gas prices.

But I asked myself, why is that?

And I think it's because what Americans see in Ukraine is what we want for ourselves, which is freedom, courage, unity, a mobilized society in which people work together in a common cause.

We don't want to have to be invaded by Russia in order to get to that.

But there's almost a longing for something like the incredible effort and energy that we see from Ukrainians.

But it's far away and the colors are blue and yellow, not red, white, and blue.

I see blue and yellow flags all around the Northeast, whether it's in liberal Brooklyn or in conservative, rural Maine.

It doesn't seem to matter too much about where.

And it might even be an area that voted for Trump or an area that voted for Biden.

And I asked myself, how can we possibly hold onto that and bring it to ourselves?

And I'm afraid we can't.

We can't expect Ukraine to solve our problems.

We have to do that for ourselves.

What we see in Ukraine is an image of what we'd like to have here, but it shows there is some common longing, there's a common aspiration.

But once we get to the details, we start fighting again.

- Still working on the details.

Yeah, the common ground.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Okay, one step you would take.

Last word, what's the one step you would take?

- Let's go back to education.

Will is right that educational inequality leads to income inequality, but income inequality leads to educational inequality.

We have a top 10% in this country that is the educated elite who are a kind of new aristocracy and who pass on the benefits and privileges to their children.

In fact, that's their main task in life is to make sure it stays within the family as a kind of family heirloom.

We need to find ways not, I wouldn't say to break that aristocracy, but simply to make education a force for democracy again.

- All right, Michelle, I know you had once on the anniversary of January 6th, you wrote about the potential for civil war.

And you have young children as we've established.

How optimistic are you for their future?

- I mean, like a lot of people, I feel intense, overwhelming, fear, and despair.

My son, he's the older one, often asks me, "What do you think the world is going to be like when I grow up?"

And I mean, I feel sick when he asks me that.

I can't answer.

I deflect it.

I say, "What do you want the world to be like?

What do you think it'll be like?"

But, you know, and I think, I mean, to what George said about kind of fortress family of the upper 10%.

Part of that is feeling like because we're bequeathing our children something so defiled that we have to use our resources to protect them as best we can from the consequences of that.

And I feel like that all the time.

But yeah, I feel immense sadness and loss looking at the country that they're going to inherit versus the one that I did.

- I'm going to have to go to Senator Murphy, I think, for the optimism - Yeah.

- because Vogue...

Sorry.

- Different lines.

- Sorry.

No.

And you're going to get the last word, Chris, because Vogue Magazine of all places wrote a piece on you called the "Relentless Optimism of Senator Chris Murphy", which talked about your gun safety mission and work.

You have two sons, Rider and Owen.

Does that optimism transfer to where you think this country's going?

- Of course, it does.

Listen, we just spent 10 years building a political movement to overcome the stickiest of American problems, right, the power of the gun lobby.

Maybe no more powerful, entrenched interest in American politics at times over the last quarter century than the gun lobby and while we didn't get close to everything we needed, we were able to finally sort of flip that power dynamic.

And so, yeah, I feel despair over the moment that we are in.

But then I think to myself, I am part of the 0.001% of human beings who lives in a country in which I get to say something about the future of this community, of this nation.

And democracy is not lost.

It is not gone.

It is still often working to our benefit as I made the case at the beginning of this hour.

- On that note, it's time to wrap up our broadcast on a hopeful note with a silver lining moment as we all struggle to come up with a prescriptive that will help fortify our democracy.

Republican congressman in January 6th committee member, Adam Kinzinger shared his.

- Oaths matter, character matters, truth matters.

If we do not renew our faith and commitment to these principles, this great experiment of ours, our shining beacon on a hill, will not endure.

- It's up to us to make sure that it does.

I don't know what to say about this panel.

You have knocked our socks off.

And we're so grateful to all of you for joining us.

And we thank you at home for joining us.

Originally from the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, now from Litchfield, Connecticut, until we see you back here next time for Common Ground, I'm Jane Whitney, take care.

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