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Who will lead the Republican party into the future? THIS WEEK on Firing Line. With the Biden administration NOW in office…
Biden: Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.
…and Democrats controlling Congress by the slimmest of margins
Harris: being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative
With differing views about how we vote and how to get things done…
Elizabeth Warren: I believe we need to get rid of the filibuster now.
McConnell: they would guarantee themselves immediate chaos.
…where does the Republican Party go next, and what’s the roadmap for a stronger democracy? What do Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum and former White House speechwriter David Frum say now?
‘FIRING LINE’ WITH MARGARET HOOVER IS MADE POSSIBLE BY — CHARLES R. SCHWAB, THE FAIRWEATHER FOUNDATION, CRAIG NEWMARK FPHILANTHROPIES.
AND BY —
HOOVER: Anne Applebaum, welcome to Firing Line. David Frum, welcome back to Firing Line.
FRUM: It’s been a while.
HOOVER: Yeah. Look, the two of you are longtime friends and fellow travelers, public intellectuals identified with America’s political center-right. David, you were a White House speechwriter and author of the recent book, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy. Anne, you are the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and your most recent book, Twilight of Democracy, chronicles the rise of authoritarianism in the West. First, for the sake of our audience, how do each of you characterize your political views in this moment? Anne, you first.
APPLEBAUM: So that’s a difficult question to answer. You know, you just described me as being center-right. I’m not sure I would call myself that anymore. I might have done so 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. I think I would now have to call myself a center of the center. I don’t identify at all with the modern Republican Party. I voted Democrat for the last several elections. Historically, I was an anti-communist. I was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s and, you know, believed very much in the overthrow of communism. And that put me on the right. But in the modern world, we no longer have a right and left that are arguing over the size of the state or arguing even much over economics anymore. They’re arguing over cultural issues. And I find that I don’t really agree with the extremes on either side.
HOOVER: David, do you still consider yourself to be a conservative or a Republican?
FRUM: I am a registered Republican and I think that the survival of a healthy, flourishing Republican Party committed to democratic values is very, very important. And certainly, if I were living in one of the, I live in the District of Columbia, but if I were living in California, New York, I would be, I think, pretty active in state Republican politics to make politics in those places competitive. That said, I’m not a great one for looking inward and fighting my politics on the inside. Politics comes to you from the outside. The great fact of political life is change. It’s an exam where the questions are constantly changing.
HOOVER: Look, both of you in your recent books used “democracy” in the title, right? Tell me right now, is democracy in peril Anne?.
APPLEBAUM: Yes, I do think it’s in peril, it’s in peril not just in the United States, but around the world. In the United States, what we’re watching is not just polarization, so not just deep divisions between Republicans and Democrats, but we’ve also seen a part of the public, mostly inside the Republican Party, turning against the institutions of American democracy themselves and questioning their value and reliability. So, I mean if you look at the attack on the Capitol on January the 6th, that wasn’t Republicans fighting Democrats. That was a group of people who were fighting the system, and they were there to block the process of American democracy. But you can see an echo of similar disappointment and similar distress in quite a lot of democracies, including, you know, big developing country democracies as well as European democracies. So, yes, I do believe it’s a threat. It’s not just in the US, but it’s around the world.
HOOVER: I want to ask you, David and Anne, both about your solutions for strengthening democracy here at home. But first, let’s agree on what is, in your estimation, broken. What elements, David, of our democracy here at home are most urgently in need of reform?
FRUM: Look, America has always been very conditionally committed to democracy. You know, before 1965 that there was racial supremacy across much of the country. But I think things have been going especially in reverse since 2010. And the very radical gerrymander that happened after the election 2011, which has institutionalized minority rule at many state levels. Why is that so important? Because what happened in 2010 was that Republicans got a danger and an opportunity. They discovered that their ideology was increasingly out of sync with where the country was. The country did not want what Republicans were offering. But the political system offered new opportunities to use minority power to foist an unwelcome ideology. So one of the reasons I have been so on the soapbox is because one of my concerns is to bring the Republican Party into the 21st century and to say, you know what, this narcotic of rigging elections, it’s not good for you either. That the right thing to do is to compete, to offer useful policies for the country. Not to try to rig elections so that even though your policies are massively rejected, you can eke out power anyway.
HOOVER: You write, “visibly preventing minorities from voting” was the strategy that Trump’s reelection depended upon. And you later said,“Once the game of voter suppression is off the table, normal political competition may revive the GOP as a center right party.”
FRUM: Yeah.
HOOVER: How so?
FRUM: Well, I think Americans tend to be very pessimistic about their chances in open competition, and I always find that kind of incredible. The most successful political organization in the democratic world is the Conservative Party of Great Britain. They’ve dominated the politics of Britain for the past century. The message of a flourishing business environment with people keeping most of their money for themselves beyond what’s necessary to sustain a moderate social insurance network. Those are powerful messages that can work in democratic competition. But in the United States, conservatives have been much more doubtful. And so they have focused in the pre civil rights era on a racial basis — in the post civil rights era, on a nominally nonracial basis — on shaping the electorate, not shaping their policies.
APPLEBAUM: To add a historical note to this, if you look back in history at the numbers of democracies that have gone wrong, very often they have gone wrong because the center right has gone wrong. In other words, center right parties are very often the anchor of electoral systems because they are homes for voters who dislike rapid change, who are willing to accept some alterations in their lives, but they would like some feeling of continuity and stability. And it’s when center right parties become more extreme or when they split up or divide that you very often have challenges to democracy and you have real democratic declines. It’s another historical reason why maintaining a Republican Party that seeks to be a center party, in other words that seeks to win the votes of a wide variety of people, not just people defined narrowly geographically or or culturally, but people in, you know, from all different kinds of communities. This is very important for the maintenance of democracy in the United States.
HOOVER: Take this question of gerrymandering, David. Because what Republicans, of course, will tell you is that both sides do it and perhaps the Republican Party has just been more successful at it.
FRUM: Well, both sides have done it, but something changed in 2010. It really is different now. And here, here are the way and here are the things that have changed. First, beginning in the early 60s, the civil rights era, the courts began policing gerrymandering. After 2010, courts exited supervising gerrymandering. And in two Supreme Court cases at the end of the 2010s, the Supreme Court said, ‘that’s it. I mean, unless there is an actual record of an explicit intent to disenfranchise a racial minority group, do what you want.’ And finally, you just you never had the kind of control that the Republicans got because of the accident, that that the big sweep election of 2010 occurred in a year ending with a zero. The United States conducts a census every year ending in a zero, and then the redistricting happens in the following year, the year ending in a one. But in 2010, there was a more extreme gerrymander than ever before, at a time when the courts were out of the business; at a time when Americans are spatially segregating anyway. So the map favors the Republicans in these projects, the law favors the Republicans in the project, the timeline favored the Republicans in the project, and deterrence in 2010 vanished. So they went for the gusto. And the result is, a state like Wisconsin, Republicans get 45 percent of the vote and take 65 percent of the seats in the state legislature.
HOOVER: Another reform you’ve both written about is the filibuster. Anne, you’ve called it a relic of the past. Because of the Senate filibuster, of course, most legislation requires 60 votes to move forward. How would ridding ourselves of the filibuster strengthen democracy?
APPLEBAUM: One of the oddities about the filibuster is that if you try to explain it to someone who lives in a different democracy, they look at you like you’re crazy. ‘What? That can’t possibly be the rule. Why does that work?’ The filibuster is not a constitutional rule. I’s not connected to the founders or to anything essential about the Constitution. It’s also a reflection of something bigger, which is more generally speaking, the decline of Congress, Congress as an institution that can pass laws and get things done. And so and so the filibuster now operates as a tool that just makes it much harder to get things done. The filibuster is also a particular problem because of the nature of the Senate. David has just spoken very eloquently about gerrymandering and how that affects state legislatures and, of course, it affects the House of Representatives as well. But in a way, the bigger problem is the structure of the Senate. And again, the structure of the Senate, which is in the Constitution, means that rural America now out votes urban America and a number of states where very few people live can outvote states where a lot of people live. And this has created another democratic imbalance. Large numbers of the population who want things like gun control, which is a very popular idea, are now outvoted in the Senate by a small number of people in less populated states because they have two senators for Wyoming, which has a few hundred thousand people and two senators for California, which has many millions of people. And the filibuster, in a way, adds to that. So in other words, you already have this kind of grotesquely imbalanced Senate. On top of that, you have this arcane procedural rule, which means that it’s even easier for that smaller population to outvote the rest of the country. And I think for the sake of, you know, for the sake of democracy it should be removed, at least in certain cases or in certain circumstances.
FRUM: I think people don’t understand how new the filibuster is. The filibuster in its present form does not— dates back to the 1970s and the filibuster in its real active form dates back only about 15 years. So the filibuster is new and it is not some hallowed tool of antiquity. The filibuster also and this is, I think, one of the things that Anne really drives home here. The filibuster encourages political irresponsibility. Here’s how it’s harmful to democracy. Republicans have been campaigning since 2010 to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Although the Republicans fulminate against the law, defund the law, try to sabotage the law, they’ve never accepted the responsibility of power to create an alternative that people can see that accomplishes the ends that Republicans say they want because they say, ‘well, why bother? We don’t have 60 votes.’
HOOVER: You two also both have something in common with many Democrats and that is that D.C. should become a state. Of course, that would give D.C. two senators, presumably they would be Democrats. Anne, why are you in favor of D.C. statehood?
APPLEBAUM: First of all, I’m in favor of D.C. statehood because it’s a matter of justice for the District of Columbia. I mean, I am actually a native Washingtonian. I was born in D.C. I was brought up there. But it would also very quickly solve one of the problems that I pointed out, which is the imbalance of the Senate between rural and urban America because D.C. is obviously an urban area. And so it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a constitutional one. It doesn’t require a constitutional reform or change. It’s not complicated. If we simply admit D.C. as a state, then we’d have a little bit of the problem solved.
FRUM: Let me add something to that. When people say, well, it’s obvious the Democrats are talking about D.C. and Puerto Rico as states with a view to game the Senate, that’s sort of true. Yes, that’s what they want to do. But the reason they are gaming the Senate is, there is a party whose power in the House depends on making it difficult for Americans to vote. So it’s a crude justice. The better answer would be, make sure that Americans have a legal right to vote. But the right to vote itself doesn’t exist. Only how that right may be regulated. So if the art of American politics has been finding ways to take away people’s right to vote in ways that don’t trigger a judicial reaction, but that’s wrong. We’ve got to stop doing that.
HOOVER: I’m going to take the conversation to how to move beyond the moment of Donald Trump for the Republican Party and the country. David, seven Senate Republicans voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role of inciting the insurrection, and you called that a good day.
FRUM: Yes.
HOOVER: Because it was more than expected.
FRUM: Yes.
HOOVER: But the fact is that the GOP still largely, particularly the base, believes in Donald Trump, supports Donald Trump. Do you suspect that his influence will wane? Or continue?
FRUM: I think we can see his influence waning and waning fast. He has become a kind of cultural totem, like refusing to wear a mask, like carrying a gun everywhere. I mean, it’s a way– saying you’re for Donald Trump is sort of a way of offending people you regard — people do it to offend people who seem too pious or too bossy. But you can see that Donald Trump’s problems — his lack of attention, his laziness, his corruption — those have become real obstacles to his power outside of politics. And he’s going to have tremendous legal problems. So I do think it’s waning. He also insists that everything be about himself. 2022 should be a pretty good Republican year. The Democrats have the presidency, that usually generates a reaction, the map is favorable and they’ve got all of these gerrymandering opportunities. But Donald Trump insists the election must be a referendum on him, on how great he was. And he’s going to drive — he’s going to create primary challenges, or try to, all in order to assert, ‘Let’s keep talking about me forever.’ And if the Republicans keep talking about him forever, they will continue to do as badly as they did in the elections of 2018 and 2020.
HOOVER: Anne, you wrote a very important column after the insurrection on January 6th in The Atlantic, where you used the word seditionists to describe not just the people who took part in the riot, but the far larger number of Americans who were united in their belief that Donald Trump won the election. Now, the title of that column was “Coexistence is the Only Option.” Explain how a party goes forward coexisting with seditionists.
APPLEBAUM: That column was an attempt to address a kind of misapprehension in the majority of the country, actually, but certainly on the left and certainly among people who vote Democrat, who vote Democrat, that this group of, very large group, who believes that Donald Trump won the election, and the smaller but still significant group who backed the Capitol insurrection, who believe that that group can somehow be ignored or pushed aside, or we can just forget about them because they don’t count. I mean, much as some would like that to be true, that’s not going to happen. And so therefore, we need a modus operandi. We need a way forward. We need a way to think about politics and think about political conversation that — that will allow us to avoid violence and allow us to make some progress. And when I was thinking about this, I tried to think of precedents for this situation. And the closest I could come to was Northern Ireland. And the way in which the situation there finally moved forward and towards peace was through people agreeing to talk about other things. In other words, we’re not going to talk about the thing that we really — that we’ll never agree about, which is: are we British or Irish? But instead we’ll talk about the local community center or how to fix the roads. We’ll focus on economic issues. We’ll focus on other things that we all have in common, and we’ll leave the elephant in the room outside. And I was arguing that some way of conversation between the left and the right or Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. will also have to move forward on that basis. You know, can we at least try to have national debates that are about economics or about infrastructure in which we can put aside the fact that we disagree about who won the election or we disagree about guns or we disagree about some of these other big cultural issues and focus on that.
HOOVER: David, in Trumpocalypse, you did warn that there is a real possibility that the GOP could degenerate into a, quote, “cult of personality that exists to enable and protect the maximum leader.”
FRUM: Yes. I don’t think this is something, by the way, that is exclusive to right of center people. I think there are a lot of left of center people. It’s a personality type. There are people who are easygoing and their people are not easygoing. There are people who are prone to compromise and there are people who reject compromise and they’re distributed across the political spectrum. I think the answer to this is that Republicans and conservatives are going to have to learn this through negative experience. They’re going to have to try and fail and try and fail. And it’s been going on for a while and they’re going to keep trying and failing until they understand: maybe it’s time to try something else. Maybe we should try actually having a health care law that’s acceptable to us. Maybe we should try to meet some of the problems. If people could understand, we are going to have to answer the question. OK, we’ve promised not to have Obamacare, but to protect preexisting conditions. How do you do that? Write the bill. The resources are there to do that work. Do that work.
APPLEBAUM: I agree that the impulse towards authoritarianism can be left wing or right wing. You know, I spent much of my career writing books about the Soviet Union, so I’m under no illusions that there could be a form of left wing authoritarianism because there has been historically. But what — what all of the best science and what all of the best analysts have concluded is that the impulse towards — the impulse against democracy increases in times of stress and in times of rapid change, and we are right now living in one of those periods of very, very rapid change. And one of the things I think that this has created in a lot of places, and this is true in Europe and it’s true in the US and it’s true in other countries, too, is a reaction against change itself and also a reaction against the noise of change and the clamor of public debate. You know, there’s simply a — there’s a strain of people who would like things to remain silent and they would like everyone to be quiet and they would like to have a sense of solidity and stability and security given — delivered to them by their ruling figures, whoever they are. And all of these impulses can be — you know, unless — unless used in the right way — can be anti-democratic impulses. And we see them — I just think it’s not a coincidence that we see them right now all over the world, including in the United States. And so — and I do think that the American Republican Party has sought to find those people, identify with them and make them more frightened and more anxious about the times that we live in. And they’re not — they’re not alone in doing that.
HOOVER: Anne your — you wrote a recent piece, “How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire.” And you wrote, quote, The civic habits necessary for a functioning republic “have been killed off by an Internet kleptocracy that profits from disinformation, polarization and rage.” What — how did the Internet contribute to the current state of polarization?
APPLEBAUM: So in addition to some of the other things that we’ve discussed — the imbalances in politics, the Senate, the House — one of the other sources of democratic decline in the United States, and along with other democracies, is the state of the modern Internet, by which I don’t just mean social media, I mean the Internet, more broadly. The best way to think about it is to think about what the Internet looks like in an authoritarian country. In China, the Internet is controlled by the state and it reflects the values of Chinese authoritarianism. It’s surveillance, censorship, control. But in the Western world, the Internet does not reflect the values of democracy. It doesn’t you know, there are no — there are no human rights built into the Internet. There’s no openness. There’s no transparency. Instead, our Internet is controlled by a very few companies who operate it according to secretive algorithms that we don’t have any control over or have any influence over or have any insight into. You know, the companies are, you know, are tracking what you see and read. They’re collecting data about you, and they’re using that data to feed back to you information that they think you will want to see. And the reason why they’re doing that is not to promote democracy or to promote better civic conversation or polite discourse. They’re doing so in order to keep you online and to get you to buy things. So they’re — they’re motivated by advertising. They’re not motivated by the need to promote better discourse or better conversation. But one of the pieces of the solution could be thinking much more creatively about how to have online debates in spaces that aren’t regulated by Facebook or by Twitter, but are — but are regulated according to rules designed to increase — increase civic conversation.
HOOVER: We always run a clip from the original Firing Line on the program. And David, by my count, you were a guest on Firing Line four times. In 1974, days before Nixon’s impeachment hearings, William F. Buckley Jr. pressed then Republican Party Chairman George H.W. Bush about the GOP in a post Nixon era. Take a listen to this, both of you.
BUCKLEY: The Republican officials are divided on whether association with Mr. Nixon helps or hurts. As head of the Republican Party, is it — is it uncomfortable for you to cooperate with people running for Congress on an “I have nothing to do with Nixon” ticket.
BUSH: Well, it’s not — I think we’ve got room in our party for diversity. And my advice to them — and very few people seek it these days — but when, if they do, I’ll say: look, emphasize the good things that the administration has done and jump up and down and say, you don’t like Watergate. Be against the bad things, be for the good things.
HOOVER: Reflect on how different the party is now than it was in that moment.
FRUM: The difference is the way to get ahead in the Republican Party in the post-Trump era is to be for the bad things and to be against the good things. So simply saying, I mean, you think what a breath of fresh air to acknowledge that the president did do bad things and that you might oppose them. The — those Republicans who have opposed the very worst thing that Donald Trump ever did, which is incite this attack on Congress — they find themselves in terrible trouble. And, yeah, we could use George H.W. Bush back again, that’s for sure.
HOOVER: Anne.
APPLEBAUM: I think it’s interesting that George H.W. Bush emphasized the point that the Republican Party is a coalition, as is the Democratic Party, as are — have to be parties in our two party system. And I think the fact that it has to be a coalition is maybe the one thing that can save us. And pushing them to recognize that they need this broader coalition in order to win national office — that’s the — that’s the hope we have, that the party will begin to think about broadening its views and its attitudes in the future.
HOOVER: David Frum, Anne Applebaum, thank you very much for your time and for joining me here on Firing Line.
APPLEBAUM: Thank you.
FRUM: Goodbye.
‘FIRING LINE’ WITH MARGARET HOOVER IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE MARGARET AND DANIEL LOBE FOUNDATION, ROBERT GRENIER, CHARLES R. SCHWAB, THE DAVID TE TEPPER FOUNDATION, THE FAIRWEATHER FOUNDATION, CRAIG NEWMARK PHILANTHROPY AND BY — CORPORATE FUNDING IS PROVIDED BY STEVENS INC.
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