 We are so happy to be back. This is Think Tech, I'm Jay Fiedel and our show today at this point in time, on a given Thursday is history is here to help. And we have an historian with us, Peter Hoffenberg. Thank you so much for joining us, Peter. Of course, thank you for asking. So, you know, we saw January 6th, we saw, you know, the risk that our democracy was gonna come apart. And you know, I felt like there was a bullet whizzed by our ear. On the other hand, I've felt that way for the past four years myself. And luckily, the bullet just missed us and we managed to get out of a very threatening situation. However, there are still a lot of people out there who feel the same way that they felt on January 6th. And there are still a lot of people who, you know, are suggestible for that. So what you have is a restless peace and it's not clear that democracy will last. You know, we know that the courts have been stacked. I suppose they've been stacked before. We know that the Congress is ineffectual. I mean, it's locked up, even though the Democrats have a majority and we're still struggling over that. And thankfully we have Joe Biden who is rational and trying to do his best. But the question is, you know, with Trump out there and Trump is all behind him and this awful experience we had over the past four years and on January 6th, you know, exactly how safe are we? Is our democracy in good shape or has it declined? Well, putting it in a larger sense, Peter, is democracy around the world declining in favor of autocracy? Autocracy almost seems to work better these days. So where are we? Can you talk about first, can you talk about democracy in this country? How well is it working? So, okay, my pleasure. Anyhow, thanks again. And as always, these are only my views. I'm wrong in and of myself. My incorrectness has no bearing on the university. All right. So you asked me to participate as a historian. So let me give you a couple of responses to get us going and then we can continue. One is whether this is a particular problem for the United States as in American exceptionalism, which I don't use in a flag waving way. Every historian will tell you there's something exceptional about every country. So whatever we say about American exceptionalism, it's not a bravado. It's a democracy is not an entirely universal system, which won't surprise anybody. And it has its own usual political national distinctions. So democracy in Germany is not the same as democracy in America. And certainly it has its generational distinctions. So is American democracy at this moment, at this place under threat? And I guess that's the essence of what you're asking a historian to suggest. And so my suggestion would be it is challenged, but I don't think fundamentally under a threat the way that so many other people think so. So I'm not really saying that they are incorrect. I guess my perspective is many of the issues we're facing and have faced over the past several years, this country has faced for its 200 plus years. And what I mean by that is not just the racial question, but the question which we talked a little bit about the end last time, states rights that's always been an issue for American democracy. So I look at this moment as one of those historical moments when states rights, which is used to cover a lot of particularly non-palatable attributes, including slavery and racism, et cetera. It's not always that cake, but it can be used to cover that. So the answer is this is a states rights federalist crisis. It is a crisis that this democracy has faced so many times. Now, having said that, excuse me, there are some clear differences, right? And we've talked about that and the fact that we're on social media is a clear difference, all right? So other times it was a lot more difficult to organize people and to get them unfortunately to attack particular people. So I think that this democracy has to decide what it is going to do with information. And that's always been the case, right? Excuse me, I apologize. The printing press, right? That decide what to do with the printing press in the 18th century. So I look at this as one of those moments like radio in the 30s, where FDR, and I think I would say democratically inclined leadership, I know other people thought that he was an autocrat, have a choice to use the technology properly. And that's why I'd like to see us use it to preserve democracy. Or like Father Coughlin, right? You have the possibility. So the answer, I'm sorry, long winded, you ask the historian, you know, he's never gonna use, he or she's never gonna use three words when 16,000 are available. But my response most immediately would be, we are under a crisis. It's a crisis we have seen before and it can be resolved using the tools we have. I think it would be a mistake to make radical changes. For example, I think it would be a mistake to enlarge the Supreme Court. It would be a mistake, I think, to make major constitutional or institutional changes. Those institutions and the constitution can work. We need to find a way to compromise. Now, having said that, the second point is that a democracy's crises are not just a matter of states' rights, they're also a matter of society and the really glaring inequality of our society. And every time in human history that a government or a group has sought to raise up other people or let them raise themselves up, another group has always felt betrayed and resentful. It's always been the case. And what we have here, I think, and I've tried to pay as much attention as I can and not just see the hate and the anger, but try to understand the sense of betrayal. The folks who destroyed the Senate felt betrayed. Now, this is not Dr. Hopenberg saying whether that's a scientifically irrational sense of betrayal or not. Okay, they feel that way and democracy has to recognize that. So the second point I think is we do actually have a very significant social crisis. I know a lot of people have been talking about the court and Congress, et cetera, but democracy can also only work if there's a particular society. And inequality combined with armed resentment of betrayal, right? Is the recipe of the civil war, right? That's the civil war, the elective president who, now we know he changed his view about slavery by 1862-63, but it's also pretty clear that it's worth reminding the 1860 election, Lincoln was committed to not spreading slavery, right? So already that was on the table, whether or not he would have ended slavery in the slave states is a different matter, but certainly, I mean, part of this, the Lincoln, so the second point, then I'll shut up. The second point is we are facing a social crisis. And democracies around the world have survived when there's been a vibrant, more equal society, housing. Wealth, healthcare, right? So the democracy means participation and engagement, okay? So I would say I am very worried, but I also think we have the means to address it. The final point, then I will shut up. It's democracy is an aberration, right, historically. Democracies usually do not last very long. Democracies are much tougher to govern, right? So the fact that we have a crisis reveals to us that we have had probably an irrational religious faith in democracy as an ideal. We should have a rational working relationship to democracy. And it's sort of as if we're looking at democracy as a vaccine, which we had great confidence in and suddenly isn't working. So we're gonna go into a crisis, whereas what we need to do is improve the vaccine, right? Not avoid a vaccine, okay? So I'll shut up, I apologize. But those are three points I would try to make, right? Yeah, okay, and I think bottom line, though, is that democracy or any other government has to manage things, it has to rule. And hopefully for the best, hopefully in an equitable manner, hopefully in a way that the country, the economy will thrive and people will feel that their interests are being served, all of that. But it has to rule. And if it cannot rule, if it's non-functional, as our Congress seems to be just almost there, I would say that Biden's election was good. I would say that the Democrats' position in Congress is better than it was under Trump, but it's still hanging by a thread. And there are people using these phony, baloney rules like filibuster to stave off action, legislative action. In a more perfect world, the legislature would identify the problem, it would have a discussion among itself, it would talk to its constituents, and it would take action. We don't seem to do that anymore. We're all tied up in process, this is a bad thing. And we can't make decisions and we fight and we walk around with guns in our pockets in the legislature. And we have legislators actively colluding with those who would attack the government and the Capitol. So, I mean, I think this is different than, you know, some of the elements you mentioned, yes indeed, we've had those in this country. But query whether we've had them all in such a way as we have had them recently. I talk about Trump as if he was in the past, I'm not sure he's in the past and I'm not sure his constituents are in the past. I only know that when we got up through this point in this administration, in the Trump administration, and in the final days of the Trump administration, there was a serious issue in this country as to the transfer of power. There was a serious issue, there has been a serious issue about whether the branches of government respect each other, work with each other are out to serve the common good or out to serve the people. And I suspect, you know, my observation of it is that in my lifetime, which is getting long already, in my lifetime, it's never been worse on those metrics as the government serving the people is the government functional. And the government that's not functional will fail either internally or externally or both. That concerns me. And if the democracy that we, I love your expression of it, it's almost religious, that we have had religious piety to over so many years if the government is not gonna function, what have we got left? There are people in this country, Peter, who think we are in a civil war or will be soon or that it never ended. And I'm very worried about people who claim that the Second Amendment helps them go shoot game on the reserves when in fact, the Second Amendment helps them shoot people in the streets. Why exactly do we need a Second Amendment like that? But there it is. And I'm worried about a government which is based on a constitution that has not nearly changed enough. I guess the important thing about a democracy is that it's resilient and that it's respectful of change and that it is flexible and even nimble. And our constitution for all our piety over it has not been nimble, it has not been flexible, it has not been changed nearly enough. It has not reflected changes in the country. And you can do that for 50 years or a hundred even. You can do that through a civil war even, but right now the change is coming fast and it never came before. And we are still locked into a constitution which is not flexible for the times. And I don't see any possibility that will change. You talk about states' rights, talk about the electoral vote system, talk about having two senators from each state regardless of population. This is all archaic. It's 230 years old. It's not working well. And there is no prospect whatsoever that we will be able to update it and make it modern and make it conform to the reality. This, these are benchmarks of failure and going forward it's gonna be more obvious. So while I appreciate that some of these elements have happened before, we have a confluence of elements now in my view that are worse than ever before at least in my lifetime. I would not disagree with anything you said when you asked me to have these conversations with you which I look forward to. What I wanna contribute is not that it's happened before and so we shouldn't worry about it, right? Or that nothing is new. It is a qualified, what could we learn in part from the past? So I do not dismiss any of what you said at all. What I'm just trying to do is suggest perhaps some of the longer term problems. And then we have had some of them which does not mean that they are exact repetition or that they can be resolved in the same way. No, I just wanted to give viewers a sense that some of these issues we're inclined very often to and probably often for good reason to celebrate what's new, to find things new for our generation. And that's fine, that's very happenable. And that probably comes from the enlightenment. We would also remind ourselves that not everything is new other than saying things are new. So I don't mean in a dismissive way at all. I think some things particularly as we've talked about social media has entirely changed the game. But that's why a historian can suggest rather than let's just think of social media as being brand new, let's think of the way people responded to, for example, printing press. Let's think about the way people responded to telegraph. Let's think about the way people responded to the radio, not to be equivalent, but to say, for example, rather than rushing into control and not necessarily understanding some limitations of control, how can those be used to favor democracy? Right, there's the enlightenment as a movement recognize that the monarchy had all the power to bust printing presses, all the power to arrest printers and writers. At the same time though, why not take advantage of the printing press? So that would be my contribution I hope people think about. Well, let's look at some of these other similar situations. Historians think in context, so never think the exact same. But I do think that this is a very similar situation in many ways to 1860, where the response of the South was not to protest the election, it was to lead the United States. Issues are not dissimilar, right? Back then pro-slavery was the socialism of today, right? So any effort to promote equality was considered to be an example of racial betrayal, whereas today it seems to be just as much a Bolshevik and allegedly Bolshevik. So that's all I'm suggesting now. I think though, that you and I disagree on the constitution in the sense that there are means to amend it. The bar is pretty high, it's pretty hard to amend the constitution, right? I agree and we might revisit how to amend the constitution. But when I look at it out of the problems in the US, I find them more in the case that one political party and one group of folks are gaming the system. So rather than tossing out the system, let's try to stop the gaming of the system. So rather than rewriting the constitution, let's make sure the constitutional limits which allow everybody to vote get reinforced. If the constitution allows one to be a member of a militia, which is really what it says, right? We have to rethink whether that really means a military style weapon. So it seems to me that that's an avenue we can pursue. Now, the politics of that, of course, would be who gets to appoint judges. And we've seen the last four years how successful gaming the system has been. But I do not think the other side should go and gain the system in its own way. I think the other side needs to take advantage of retirements. You can impeach judges. Actually, there have been many more judges impeached, the political figures. And it may be in the case that some of the appointed judges have committed impeachable grounds. That's a possibility. But I would not want to see Schumer and the Democrats pull an economy, that only a certain ideological position. Those four years are basically four years of letting the federalist society decide who will be the federal judges. That's not the way the founding parents recognized the power of special interests. So my response would be really, let's take a close look, let's see about men in the constitution. But let's make the constitution work. I mean, one of my heroes is Stacey Abrams, right? She's not talking about changing the laws. She's talking about making the laws work, letting people vote who are supposed to vote and changing those laws which are antithetical. It's that goal. Well, that's true. And I would not disagree with the notion that before you throw out the constitution or try to do dramatic changes on the constitution, you have to try statutes and you have to try to get the courts to abide by the statutes that the legislature comes up with or at least collectively, they come up with a reasonable result. But I think our Congress is dysfunctional, not going to come up with statutes and the courts are there. Whether they are good or not, whether those appointments are good for the country or not. The fact is that the country has lost its confidence in the system. And that's an attitudinal thing. We need to have, don't you agree, we need to have public confidence in the system. We need to have a social framework and engagement between the public and the government where we're all part of the government and the government is part of us. I think we began that way. We began that way in the early days where it was all together and we were all happy to be there and they were happy to have us as part of them. Sure, there were problems and issues and disagreements but the government and the people were more synonymous. So you have an attitudinal problem now. People don't see the government as part of them. They would like to argue with the government, they disrespect the government, they have no confidence in the government, they turn their back on the government, they turn their back on all the laws. I mean, we've had so much discussion about the rule of law and there were so many people in this country that do not believe it and do not abide by it and they wanna game it and they know what it means but they wanna game it. So, I wanna lay this at the feet at least for this discussion of social media, of propaganda, if you will, the modern day 21st century propaganda. That's what we have and it turns people away from government. It makes us all cynics. It disinformation is rife in this country and there are a lot of people who believe in it and accept it and there's nobody really that can stop it except maybe the social media companies, Suesponte. This is troubling because they may not be ultimately interested in doing that. And I think this also explains, Peter, the fact that democracy in its own way is in trouble elsewhere and the social media is easy. A dictator can find and use social media more than it was liking or her liking than a democracy. It just works better for a dictator. Once he gets his hands on the social media, he can perpetuate his message, he can change the social fabric in many ways and change the way people think. And I think we're seeing that with the exception of a few democracies that are still reasonably vital. I think other democracies are in jeopardy because of social media because dictators can use them better. And it is shades of the failure of the 20th century in Europe where propaganda became the way to confuse millions of people and they stood back in fear and let dictators control everything irrationally. So I worry about the effect of propaganda, social media on democracies. And I think that's part of what we're talking about today. I think it's certainly part of what we're talking about. So recognizing there is an intimate relationship to the health, between the health of a democracy, however we define democracy. I think at some point, we have to have a conversation about what that sacred word means and how democracy and republicanism, the little R have coexisted in this country. That's part of the difference. Republicanism as in, there are groups of individuals who represent other people. Makes for a very interesting, important discussion. There's no pure democracy. There can never be. I mean, the great theorists always recognize that a pure democracy can really only work in a Vermont village. I mean, if your democracy is each person, participates equal. That's just not conceivable. Well, I think that's a really, really good point. It's about rhetoric. It's about finding your terms. Right, so the crisis is between democracy as a very noble, rather long historical idea that each individual is valued. And each individual is valued and should have the opportunity and right to either be expressed or be represented. And we only have a couple of minutes so I will easily talk about this. But I think in the conversations which everybody's having, it's quite natural. I think those two words are getting intermixed. The founding parents were not democrats. The founding parents were republicans, the little R. The democrats were the puritans of the 17th century, who locked off the king's head. So maybe for next time, and I don't mean this in an abstract idea, I mean it very practically. Like if I'm an individual in a democracy, my being, my body, myself, my mind are equal to everybody else's. But I can't have the same say, right? Because as you say, we have to manage the world, right? So in managing the world, we have to appoint somehow representatives. And I think that's where the relationship has broken down. And that relationship has broken down for many years, for many reasons. Do I trust my representative? Can the representative work with other representatives? Anecdotally, I used to work for somebody in Washington and I apologize for the anecdote, but it fits here. Who hated smoking, but he had his support North Carolina tobacco supports. So the North Carolina Senator and Congress people would vote for his district in California, which loved nature and wanted hikes. So we're back to where we ended up last time. Trust and representation can only work with compromise if you don't have an entirely homogenous society. And thankfully we do not. But I think that the constitution works for republicanism. The constitution does not work for democracy. The electoral college, right? Is anti-democratic. Two senators per state, anti-democratic. Those are anti-democratic. Senators determine who the court justices will be. Those are not democratic, but they are Republican. And I think we need to return, forget about the capitalization, Republican-Durist Democrat, right? Little letters to what republicanism means. I think we have a crisis there because the ability to honestly and sincerely represent beyond yourself or beyond your small group, we've really lost. And we've lost that kind of across the board, but I would say that there's one particular political party who has taken that to extremes. But even the democratic party needs to recognize the diversity within the party and be able to represent its different interests. Okay, sorry for being wordy, but these are really critical issues. And it's a horrible term to use, but I'm gonna use it anyhow. They're existentialist issues, which everybody always uses. I don't think that's a proper word to use the term existentialist. So with a little E. Well, Jimmy Stewart, when I go to Washington, is really ancient history. He went for not only to represent the interests of his constituents, but his town as it were, but he went to represent all the good things in America and help all the people. And Biden talks that way, and it's very refreshing to hear him say that. But if you look at that other party, the Republican party, I think it's clear. I think we can kind of agree that most of them follow Trump around. It goes to Anne Appelbaum and her article, The Atlantic, a few months ago, comparing the US with Eastern Europe. And the single biggest problem in terms of finding why people were complicit with Trump is out of fear. And the fear seems to be evolving really, the perception of it seems to be evolving in the direction of they don't wanna get primary, which means they don't wanna lose their jobs at the next election. That's self-interest. That's power, self-interest. It's the wrong motivation. They should be out there like Jimmy Stewart trying to do the right thing. And when you have this kind of the Anne Appelbaum fear problem and the risk of being primary, you really have an essential flaw in representative government. But I just wanna add one other thing and that is that the scene where Ben Franklin came out of Liberty Hall and a woman who had been waiting for the puff of smoke over the Vatican, what they were gonna come up with, she ran up to him and she said, Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin. I'm not sure he was a PhD, by the way. Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what kind of a government are we going to have? And his answer was immediate. And Chris, he said, we are going to have a Republic, madam, comma, if you can keep it. And I think that is so true then and so true now. It requires an effort, a commitment by everyone involved. And I don't think we have the commitment. I was talking about a Republican governments and a Democratic society. And nobody, nobody in human history has matched those. So a government that we understand with institutions, experts, representation, making political decisions which may not be in the interest of every single Democratic personal group, but does not suppress that Democratic society. So among, and I'm sorry we went over, so among the most venal acts is voter suppression. Voter suppression is exactly the kind of being a lack that separates the idea of a Democratic society where everybody is entitled to vote. And in voting, they then give contractually to their representative to represent them. I mean, the most, I mean, we can talk about, I mean, there are obviously contests over what is most venal. But as far as discussion, you've cracked it for us. The key problem is, it's not trusting votes. If that's an idiotic conversation, right? How many people threw it out? That's, I mean, nobody takes that seriously. But we do take seriously whether everybody who's supposed to be a citizen has been able to vote. And that's kind of rotting our system. If people cannot get, why would they care about the system? And if they didn't get the chance to vote, why would the Senator care about it? So it seems to me, particularly as society, the states and cities and counties become more diverse in all ways, always orientation, race, ethnicity, et cetera. We have to focus like the Sabrams did and saying that the health of this society, I think John Lewis would agree, the health of this society and the connection between society and the political system is still voting. But it's still the heart of a democratic or a public system that the right to vote freely, have your vote count. And most societies not do that very well. I obviously, we have problems, but almost all of them have problems. And we're very, not arduous to have more, more public, you know, on a larger scale. But, you know, the number of untouchables that get to voting in can be counted on hand, right? All large scale models, it's not that problem. Okay. Thank you, David. Okay, so I will see you in two weeks where we have a lovely moment with Dr. Jean Rosenthal, who's an expert on religion, terrorism, and we have a lot to say about matters of knowledge and faith. So thank you very much. Thank you, Peter Hopper, historian. Thank you so much, Peter. Looking forward to our next discussion. Aloha. Thank you.