 I just did with E.J. Dion and Tom Mann, which is called One Nation After Trump, a Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported, which includes almost everybody now. And I will give bad news and good news. So, the bad news, if you go through a checklist of movement towards authoritarianism, we can see a lot of things that we could check off right now. The first is when you get attacks on the free press. And when you have a president who says that the press is the enemy of the people, a phrase originated by Stalin that Khrushchev, when he became Premier of the Soviet Union, said he would not use because it's too dangerous and now has been resurrected by Donald Trump. And we see attacks on the press for fake news and for other things on a daily basis. Check that off. Attacks on an independent judiciary. And of course, hitting judges, which Trump did before he got elected with the quote-unquote Mexican judge, which he has done since multiple times with the travel bans in their various iterations, not to mention his attacks on the rest of the justice system, including the FBI. Check. A cult of personality. I alone can fix it. And then just the other day, I don't need to fill all those positions in the State Department. I'm the only one who matters. I make the policy. And basically telling people that they don't need to worry about the laws because he can deal with that on his own. Blowing up the norms. And we've seen this of course in a whole host of ways. And we've seen it from the President. We see it from his cabinet members. And we see it from Congress. And there I'll talk about the next one, which is either attacking or losing the independent legislature. And we have a Congress that has become a joke. We have a kleptocracy, which is another element of authoritarianism. And we have it with the President, with his own family. We saw another glaring example of it as he took his trip to Asia. Stopped in Hawaii, went to one of his own properties and his press secretary, spokesman, then did a commercial for his property. But we see all of that every day. How many hearings has the House or Senate, House and Senate done on that kleptocracy, much less what we've seen from the dissembling by his cabinet members. And most recently, the Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, with deep ties to Russia, zero hearings on any of that, much less hearings on some of these other elements of a slide towards authoritarianism. When you push nationalism of the blood and soil variety over patriotism of an us versus them, and when you engage in voter suppression, these are all things that you find if you're doing a checklist of a move towards authoritarianism. And they don't occur just overnight. It's a slow but steady slide. James Fallows of the Atlantic has long had a crusade against using the analogy that I'm about to use, which is the frog in the pot of cold water that changes degree by degree until it's too late. And there's a warning sign there that we need to be aware of. Now I'm gonna mention one other area which is not about Donald Trump, not about populism, but it's also something that we ought to have a great concern about. And that is a structural bias building in our political system that has it operating and will increasingly in a fashion that the framers did not expect. When the political system was set up, we had an electoral college that was set up to screen against a kind of candidate like Donald Trump. But that was because there were gonna be real people, elites, who would be there making sure that somebody who was out of control, not looking at the best interests of the country without any anchors in reality. What Alexander Hamilton wrote eloquently about, Aaron Burke, who would be a breath of fresh air compared to what we have now. And of course that part of the electoral college went away a long time ago. But when the electoral college was created with its focus on states, the ratio of population between the largest and the smallest state was 13 to one. Now it's 70 to one. And when we first began to look at popular votes in 1824, all the way up through 1996, 172 years, 44 elections, three arguably where you didn't have a clear cut winner of the presidency who won the popular vote, but only one where it was really starkly clear. One out of 44, the last five, two out of the five. And we can expect more of that because the electoral college now is tilted very significantly towards smaller and more homogeneous states. Not to mention there was an expectation that there would be real competition. And now very few of the states have any significant competition. More significant and more troubling. By 2050 or even earlier, 70% of Americans will live in 15 states. That means 30% of Americans will control 70 senators. And that is enough to override vetoes, to overcome filibusters, to do a whole lot of things. And all of that means, because of course that means those states tend to be smaller, more homogeneous, more white as the population shifts. We're gonna have a crisis of legitimacy that is not easily dealt with without dramatic constitutional change. And we're not gonna get that dramatic constitutional change. So those are the challenges. And just very briefly, the good news is we have been jolted. Jolted not just because of what Trump is doing and what his allies in Congress are enabling, but jolted because the larger slide that we've had towards division in the society, partisan tribalism combined with the growing divide between states and within states between the prosperous metropolitan areas where people are highly educated and where the economy is thriving and less prosperous, less educated rural areas that are struggling. All of those things could have gone on along with the racial divisions as the population shifts to a point of no return. Now, I think large numbers of people and groups are aware that we're gonna have to do things to try and knit the society together. And we've been jolted by this movement towards authoritarianism. And whether it's lawyers mobilizing for the travel ban on the immigration front or religious groups stepping up to protect the safety net or public interest groups moving in to try and put some restraint and shore up the independent judiciary and other reform organizations and the civil society groups like Indivisible from the bottom up beginning to mobilize may mean that our larger cultural antipathy away from a democratic society will enable us to move back on track. But you have to stretch a little bit to find that pony in the pile of manure. Thanks very much. Look, I in the camp that we're not yet at the point where we need to be hysterical but I'm certainly in the same camp. People were really worried about erosion deterioration. My own work is focused on democratic governance that has failed. I started out my career working on democratic breakdowns with Juan Linz and Al Steppen and others and saw one of the most long lasting democracies collapse in the case of Chile, which I wrote a book about. But I, and so I really, we're not facing fascism yet. We're not facing a breakdown yet. We're not facing a military coup yet. We're not facing, we fairly have fairly strong institutions. I think we strong have a strong civil society. We're not where William Corwin Hauser was when he wrote his book on the politics of mass society where the secondary associations of society have disappeared. In that sense, I think that we're at a point where there's a clarion call out there for us to get our act together and start working on these things. Let me just simply say from my own research and then observing what's going on in the United States, I think we face three crises. We face a crisis of representation. I mean, the crisis of representation stems from the fact that in fact, we don't have a proportionality of representation. That is that if the essence of representative democracy is the notion of one person, one vote, in fact, we don't have that proportionality reflected. We can see that in the case right now in Wisconsin where a majority of the voters right there do not have a majority of the representatives. And so that's a case in that regard with the class of representatives. Norm just mentioned the situation with the Senate. 1787, I mean, a lot of sense to create that particular kind of Senate, but then even today, I think it's the 17% of the population gets close to 50% of the Senate and that's certainly not representative. Nebraska has 500,000 voters and has two senators. California has 49 million voters and has two senators. So when we do away with the filibuster rule, what we're doing is we're not allowing for the minority to be represented in the Senate of the United States. It's for the majority to be represented in the United States, which is one of these great paradoxes, I guess, of our representative system. And then if you move down, if you move over to the executive branch, here we have a situation where you had a president elected who only twice in, I guess, in American history had fewer popular votes and yet was elected president of the United States. And so that leads to this problem of significant disproportionality. If there's an electoral crisis, there's also a party system crisis and a party system comes in various different forms. One of them, of course, is the heightened polarization that we see, you know, that didn't, you know, the statistics are several, something like what is it, 91% of Republicans view Democrats with disdain and 86% of Democrats, you know, correspond that. You know, in 1960, children, parents would not be that worried if their child would marry a Republican or a Democrat, 5%, 4%, something like that. In 1960, or in 2010, 49% of Republicans would be very upset if their child married a Democrat and 33% of Democrats would say the same thing. So what you have is, you know, worsening in what you might call the politics of identity surrounding these. But ironically, at the same time, with increasingly weak party systems, so these are party systems that are not strong parties, you know, they're parties that are fragmented, we see it, they're made up of independent political entrepreneurs, their campaign finance is an issue, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's kind of the first crisis is the crisis of representation. The second is a crisis of governance. And the crisis of governance, you know, in the United States, one of the, I've looked at this very carefully because I've dealt mainly with democracies that are multi-party systems. The United States fundamentally worked and Woodrow Wilson understood this and in fact, Madison himself understood this. Not when he wrote the federalist number 10, but later he understood that in fact, the parties wind up becoming the essential sort of bridges between the institutions that are based on the doctrine of separation of powers. It's the parties that allow that. And in American history, with the evolution of a two-party system, there are really only four presidents in, you know, all the way up until the second half of the 20th century that did not have majorities of their parties in Congress. This business of divided government is a fairly recent phenomena in American history and it's led to significant difficulties, you know, and we've had several crises, there are impeachments and various other things like that or quasi-impeachments. And yet somehow this divided government has still worked in part because you had moderates, I wouldn't call them the vital center that Schlesinger referred to because that's a misinterpretation of Schlesinger's views on that, but there were moderates in the situation that would actually keep things going. And then you had, at the same time, you had presidents that could really sort of work the system. And you know, I took a course at Columbia with Richard Neustadt who went on to found the Kennedy Center at Harvard and he was still one of the great scholars of presidentialism and his little book, Presidential Powers, has two things. What is presidential power? Presidential power is the power to persuade. It's the power to persuade. And what does the power persuade require? Enormous political skills. You have to be able to really be able to govern. You have to know what politics is. It's not about making a deal. It's about how you work the political system and secondly, presidential power is directly and proportionately related to the degree of popularity of the president. The more popular the president, the more possibility of power to persuade. Think of the president that we have right now who does not have any political skills. It's not the art of the deal. And at the same time, of course, has the lowest levels of popularity of any president in what, 70 years now at this particular point. And so here you have a situation that really goes to the governance. And then I'd like to sort of repeat a concern that Norm expressed too. And that is, and I've seen that in my study, the Chilean case, the abdication of the moderates, the abdication of the Democrats, the people who think, oh, well, I'm not gonna mess around with this at this particular point. I'm not gonna stand up right now. I have particular interest that I need to worry about. I have to worry about my primary election coming up and I'm not gonna then stand up and do anything about that. And that is extremely difficult. In fact, Lin says the abdication, in this work on Breakdown on Democracy, one of the most difficult situations comes up when you have an abdication of the Democrats who decide that they're not gonna really defend the system for particularistic kinds of reasons. And finally, you know, I'm on this for, that the third crisis is the crisis of the rule of law, perhaps. And here we still need to be a bit careful. We're not really where situations are like in Venezuela and other places where the Supreme Court has been taken over by the president and things like that. But, you know, let's be careful. This is one of the other lessons that you get out of these cases of a study of breakdown. Breakdowns occur when the moderates advocate, but the breakdowns also occur when the fundamental institutions of governance, they're supposed to be that neutral institutions are politicized. And by that we refer to the courts, of course, above all, but also perhaps to the armed forces. You know, the biggest mistake that Allende made in Chile was because there was such a polarization in the country that, you know, the coup finally takes place in September of 1973, but the opposition was criticizing him so much because he was too radical. So what does he do? He appoints the commanders and chief of the armed forces to his cabinet to provide for a neutral buffer. And what did that accomplish? It just made those institutions far more vulnerable to politicization and to becoming involved in the political fray. So, and think about other institutions of governance such as central banks. That is, the United States is a federal reserve. I mean, at what point do we need to worry about the politicization that leads us to, you know, a different direction? So as you can see, I am worried about significant erosion right here. I don't think we are close to a breakdown. But unless we hear the clarion call of being careful about what is going on with our institutions. And here I'm stressing the institutions, not just the culture wars. It's the institutional makeup of our system that needs to be, in fact, seriously addressed. So, thank you. I think there were a couple of things that came out from each of your comments here. Some key things that you guys seem to see as the most significant risks that are happening. One is the kind of vulnerability of the party system. It's loss of popularity, legitimacy, strength, which is something that I certainly found very striking when I wrote about this from a kind of comparative perspective. I noticed that different countries have different vulnerability to populist candidates depending on their candidate selection strategy, their rules, the strength of their political parties. And so, in the United States, it seems like there is both a political and an institutional element to that. And then the other theme that I heard in one way or another from each of you is this kind of issue of rising polarization that we are seeing a lessening of the norms of cooperation, a lessening of the norms of bipartisanship, and an increase in the idea that politics is kind of a team sport. And I think that that plays into some of the geographic issues that you talked about as well because as the party's support bases become more geographically separated, that partisan polarization has a bigger impact on the electoral college. So I think that one thing that I'm very curious about is when all this began. So right now, this issue is getting a lot of attention because people are concerned about what is happening here and also in Europe with the last few elections there have been strands of populism having various levels of success in several different countries. But if we're talking about the frog in the kind of pot of water, when did the heat start turning up? What started these two fundamental issues of polarization and kind of party decline? So we can't spend a lot of time on the history or we could take hours, but go to Newt Gingrich getting elected to Congress in 1978. And I met Newt right after he came to Washington. I set up a series of dinners with members of the class of 78. And we met every six or eight weeks and we had quite a group of people for a midterm election as freshmen. So we had Newt Gingrich along with Dick Cheney and Geraldine Ferraro and some others. And from the get go, Newt stood out. He said, 24 consecutive years of Democrats and the majority in the House, I gotta change it. I've gotta change it by nationalizing the election process instead of having individual incumbents win on their own because they've got more incumbents and their incumbents have more money and it's a slide we can't prevent. And we have to delegitimize Washington and Congress so that voters turn out and say, it couldn't be more awful than this and throw the ins out and bring the outs in. And 16 years of effort, he tribalized politics, radicalized his own party, used the ethics process as a wedge to criminalize policy differences and recruited a large group of people who really believed that Washington was evil and that he needed a blow of government. Then turned to a series of things that happened. The Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987. Now, a lot of people saying we need to bring it back. You can't bring it back in a media world that we have now. But right after that, Rush Limbaugh, who had been an obscure noontime radio host in Sacramento, moved to New York to get a national audience and then we had the last wave of populism. The pay raise, 25% for members of Congress and other public officials, an enormous public reaction against it and Rush became a national figure. That started tribal talk radio, which moved into tribal cable television and then we have it amplified by social media. You put all of those things together, then have it blown up again by the populism following the bailouts in 2008. And what you've got is parties now, you can't say that they're weaker. In some ways, they're stronger. And our parties have been behaving like parliamentary parties in some ways, not with perfect unity but close enough. And yet, what we also have is the inability of the parties to control presidential nominations and we have a country now dominated by negative partisanship. And it gets back to what Arturo was saying. People vote out because those on the other side are no longer worthy adversaries. They are the enemy trying to destroy our way of life. And it becomes a toxic brew that makes it very difficult to govern in a system that is not a parliamentary system. I'd mention one other thing. Remember when Reintz Priebus did his famous autopsy after the Republicans lost with Mitt Romney in 2012. And it was, we are becoming racially divided and we are gonna be in the minority unless we can reach out more broadly and immigration is the way to do that. That same Reintz Priebus then becomes the chief of staff to a president who is deliberately dividing on racial grounds and a party that has blown up anything having to do with immigration in a positive way and is in fact, and was especially true under the sadistic head of the Department of Homeland Security named John Kelly who is now the chief of staff basically going after people including a young girl with cerebral palsy taken out of the hospital. You put those things together and you do not have a good picture for our parties. So Sherry, I'm wondering if you might have something to add though based on your study of what's been going on in Europe because Europe didn't have a Newt Gingrich. They didn't have a Rush Limbaugh but populism has also been on the rise there. Marine Le Pen in France just had her strongest showing ever. The French mainstream parties also collapsed in that election. And around Europe, even though there hasn't been the same level of success necessarily, these parties are growing and they're growing in popularity and they're growing in their influence on the national debate. So I mean, I think that's an excellent question because as important as someone like Gingrich is, it is also really important to recognize that these trends are cross national. And if we look cross nationally, particularly in the West, we can see that starting in the 70s, you begin to see a real breakdown in kind of traditional party systems, traditional political dynamics. In Europe, because we don't have a first pass the post system in most of those countries, that is to say a majoritarian type of system where you end up with two parties, you began to see party fragmentation at this time. That is to say the two main parties, center right and center left, began to lose voters and you began to see the rise of new parties. And so manifestations of discontent in Europe tended to come via the formation of new parties. In the United States, they tended to come via insurgents within parties. So then the question is, well, why? What is it about the 70s that causes breakdowns cross nationally? And I think if we are pretty careful, we can understand precisely what was going on. It's in the 70s that the growth that we had come to take for granted for 30 years in the West begins to break down. That is to say that kind of post-war economic order that delivered pretty standard, pretty high rates of growth for three decades begins no longer to be able to do that. And also many of the social changes that had begun to percolate in the 60s really begun to take form in the 70s. In Europe, this is of course also aggravated by rising immigration. In the United States, this is aggravated for many people by the increasing mobilization and empowerment of minority groups. And so in the 70s, you begin to see really across the West signs of backlash against traditional parties. And the underlying reasons for this again are the same, the kind of breakdown of a social, the post-war social order and the post-war economic model. And so you begin to see this happen in different ways, but I think it's very important to see Gingrich, right? His ability to do that, his ability to kind of exploit this content as of course reflecting particular American, particular American context, but part of this larger cross-national phenomenon of the old order, that is to say the post-war order breaking down and changes being set in motion that I think by the early 21st century would lead us to the point where we now have populist politicians and parties in very significant positions of power really across the West. Not necessarily in government, but significant enough actors to have their views considered, to often be considered as partners in coalition governments and certainly to play an extremely significant role in agenda settings. So I think we see again, sort of somewhat similar trends across the West with different manifestations depending on the particular rules and dynamics of different democratic political systems. Yes, what I would add to that, and I agree with the analysis, in some ways I'd go back a little bit further and that is that with the end of the Cold War, you really do get, in a sense, the collapse of these two utopias in struggle. You get a middle party, such as the Social Democrats, deciding what is it that we're all about, really? You have Billy Brown's Bob Goddusburg, where he essentially gives up Marxist Leninism, the Philippine one-sided does the same thing, and so you get the third-way sort of social Democrats, and that's where you have Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and so on and so forth, and they sort of occupy this sort of middle, but you've lost some of that mystique that was out there of the ideological fervor of the past, and in that sense, the parties begin to lose what their programmatic content really is, and this has an effect all over the place. It's just aggravated over a period of time, and the danger then, of course, then becomes, some people say, well, we can answer the problems of economic distress and so on and so forth, and these aren't the traditional parties, the parties stink, the legislatures are terrible, it's sort of an anti-politics argument, and by the way, presidents, and here I take a leaf out of Latin America, pick up that same argument. Who are some of the people that are most damaging against representative institutions are presidents who are saying, look, it's not my problem, it's the Congress that doesn't do its job, right? It's the parties that don't, look for me, and so then, in elections, who do you get? A whole bunch of independents that suddenly appear. They're 40 in Mexico or something like that right now, you know, running for office, because people then want a savior, and that's me, because I'm smarter than anybody else. I guess I have a, I'm sorry, you. No, I was actually about to ask you this. I guess I have a more skeptical view, scholars, pundits, ability to identify the causes of the shift that we're, I think we're all describing. I'm skeptical on a couple of grounds, so on the one hand, I'm skeptical that the American party system up through 1970 was some sort of model to be emulated, that the American party system up through, certainly the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, was one characterized by substantial numbers of elected national representative who were vocally and persistently committed to economic and racial stratification, and it was a form of economic and racial stratification that plainly has echoes in the mobilization and the form that the Republican party takes today. But that was actually something, sorry, just to interrupt you, pause you there for a sec, because this was actually something I wanted to ask you, which is, is it, do you think that the kind of crisis that we're seeing now, or many people are seeing now, might actually just be an extension of the 1960s kind of breakup of the Democratic party as it was constituted then over Civil Rights? I think anyone who tells you, gives you a mono-causal, a single cause explanation of events today is peddling something. I just don't think that that's plausible. The other, so just to put on the table, the other reason that I have for being skeptical of, I think the story that Sherry was telling, which I think accurately identifies the beginning of the 1970s as an inflection point, not just in terms of changes to GDP, but as economists like Perkessi have identified, changes in the distribution of GDP, and changes in the relativity of different tranches off the electorate as divided by economic class to obtain the policies they want. This is the Larry Bartels literature that I would hope many people are familiar with. There is a phase shift in the early 1970s, and it might do something toward explaining the phenomena that we see today, along with the shifting dynamics of cultural and racial capital that are unique to the United States. But remember that the rise of populist, quasi-authoritarian, uncompetitive democracies is not a European or American thing alone, right? So Satura has said there is a Latin American story which is distinct and occurs along a different time scale. There are stories in Russia, which are not particularly related to the story that we've been telling. There's a story in Turkey where the slice of the population that votes for the AK party and that provides Erdogan with the backbone of electoral support is the rising Petty Bourgeoisie. It is the economically successful slice of the population. The same is true in India, right? Which is on the first couple of steps of the same path as Turkey is. But again, it is a rising Petty Bourgeoisie that is economically successful, that is nonetheless committed to a form of democratic politics that is antithetical or that adopts institutional changes and policies that are antithetical to liberal democratic constitutional democracy, right? So I think that the stories here are way more complicated and way more varied than a single causal explanation allows. So let me just reflect on some of the things that as he said, and he's right, there's certainly no single cause. Anybody who would go back and say that the 1950s were wonderful would probably be wearing a Make America Great Again hat or that the political system was a perfect one. On the other hand, in 1954, the Supreme Court voted unanimously across a very wide ideological divide for Brown versus Board of Education. They took two years to make that decision because they knew it would be an earth-shaking one and they did not want to have it divided. I am quite confident that today's Supreme Court would vote 5-4 if the same thing came up the wrong way. So there are changes that are very troubling changes that have occurred in the political system. Now you could use the analogy of the racial divisions that occurred before we got civil rights laws. But when people ask me about analogies to today, the first one obviously that comes up which is the most troubling is the period right before the Civil War. But what I would say is reconstruction. And that gets to some of the other things that disease was talking about. Growing economic inequality and working class and it's absolutely the case that if we look at Trump supporters, they weren't just white working class voters. They also included a substantial share of educated and well-to-do people who are tribal Republicans right now. But in reconstruction you had poor white sharecroppers with blacks who had been freed from slavery and were struggling as well. And then you had a small group of economic elites who were exploiting them both. And there was an enormous opportunity to have the mass joined together with their own interests against those elites and the elites deliberately used race to divide. And we are suffering the consequences of that ever since. And we are seeing in some ways a new reconstruction. Yeah, I just wanted to add up. I mean, I agree that, I mean, Nuka Grish's role really was, as you pointed out, quite determinative and sort of changing some of the, but as others have said, this goes way back. And I just simply like to say it's the change really comes. Not only, well, it started with the Democratic convention in 1948 when Hubert Humphrey stood up and when after the Truman administration the armed forces are integrated and so on and so forth. And then there's this demand for civil rights and strong thermon leaves the Dixie crats are formed. But then the key turning point is after the Civil Rights Act is in the Voting Rights Act are approved in 1964 and 65, thanks in great measure to the Republican party because if it hadn't been for ever McKinley Dirksen and those people, we would not have got that. And then what comes next? The Nixon strategy and the Nixon strategy is let's pull all those good old boys into the Republican party, you know? And when they do that, of course, then the Gillespie strategy. That's the Gillespie strategy in Virginia today. And it was the Nixon strategy back in, you know, at the time that in fact, you still had the chairmanship of all the committees in the Congress with Southern Democrats but they began to flip over. They began to flip over, you know? When I started my job at Duke University, Jesse Helms was a commentator on the radio. Jesse Helms was a Democrat then, you know? Later on he became a very prominent Republican senator. So you pull then into the Republican party all these people, it's still the politics of race. So I just wanna maybe add a little something to what Aziz and others have said. There's definitely some really important cross-national trends that are going on but I think it might be a little misleading to conflate things that are going on in places like Turkey or Russia, Hungary and Poland with what's going on in Europe and the United States. In some ways you can interpret those former cases as probably relatively predictable cases of weak new democracies having significant troubles. I mean, if you look historically in fact, countries that make transitions for the first time almost always have significant Democratic backsliding and so in fact we've had less Democratic backsliding in this quote unquote third wave than we've had in previous waves. That's not to say it's not important and significant but I don't think it's kind of surprising that Turkey didn't turn into Sweden overnight or that Hungary and Poland are having significant backsliding. These are places with really almost no Democratic experience whatsoever. What is new, what is historically unprecedented is the Democratic dysfunction and potential backsliding that is going on in countries that have long been considered consolidated liberal democracies. That is to say Europe and the United States. Now again, there's clearly cross-national trends going on here and as this panel indicates I think it's quite wise to think about things as broadly and comparatively as possible but what's historically new and therefore perhaps most worrying is that for the first time again since the post-war period we're actually seeing at the very least parts of liberal democracy being thrown into question in Europe and probably not Canada but certainly the United States and so I think there we have to look at some slightly different factors than we might when we're looking at cases of Democratic backsliding in Latin America, Turkey, Hungary, Poland and Russia and there I think really when you look at the cross-national trends in the West the 70s really are a critical inflection point. It's precisely at that time really across cases that you begin to see things like party de-alignment, increasing dissatisfaction with the political establishment, a growing alienation of voters from traditional political parties and traditional elites and again a sort of growing dissatisfaction more generally with the way politics functions. This is a trend that has been building for a long time but was clearly aggravated by more recent trends like the financial crisis but this is very much a kind of Western phenomenon that I think we wanna think about as again something that is really historically unprecedented as far as consolidated liberal democracies undergoing this kind of questioning is concerned. I don't wanna disagree with that although I think I have a slightly different view in the following sense. I think that it's easy to overstate the difference between consolidated and unconsolidated democracies along two different dimensions. The first is in many supposedly consolidated democracies large slices of the electorate were long kept out of politics. So in the United States that was African-Americans at least through the 1965. So at least through 1965 we like to think of America as a democracy since the get-go and that's false, it's just false, right? So there are somewhat similar stories you can tell in Europe but not completely analogous. So but there's a little bit more variety there than I would want to press on. The other thing that I think is important to flag is that the older consolidated democracies tend to have older constitutions and the older constitutions are ones that don't contain learning about the institutional checks that help consolidate democracy. So there's a sense in which one of the things that there's a sense in which newer democracies have a comparative advantage over earlier democracies that is they learn from their mistakes. So in Hungary and Poland are actually a very interesting example here where you have a slate of checking institutions included in their post Cold War constitutions that have by and large failed. And it is, I think, interesting and instructive to see why and how those both fail, especially for us who have the same checks to the extent that we have them as matters of statute or norm. Looking ahead, we had the economic shifts and changes in the 1970s. There's a piece in the New York Times today about how artificial intelligence is now on the verge of reaching a point where artificially intelligent machines can build even more artificially intelligent machines and that the programmers are gonna be irrelevant looking down the road. I came over on an Uber as I do on a regular basis. Those drivers who have formed a new sort of group of independent entrepreneurs will probably be history in five or six years with self-driving cars and their self-driving trucks. The robots now still require some human supervision. 10 years they may not. We're gonna have huge numbers of people and that goes way beyond working class people who've been promised by Trump that he will keep their jobs from going to Mexico when they're mostly going to robots but it's also hitting professionals in law firms now as things get moved overseas but before long you're not gonna need paralegals or others because there'll be machines who could do that for you more efficiently and cheaper and that will be the case all over the world and how political systems cope with the fact that huge numbers of people aren't gonna have jobs and a small number are gonna make a fortune from this. How are you gonna deal with that? That's not just the United States, that's China, it's everywhere in the world. The challenges created by rapid technological change are gonna be that much greater and it is entirely possible that the response to that is even more of a tendency towards authoritarianism. To kind of step back briefly to something that a couple of you have said on this question of how much this is a kind of global phenomenon versus how much these are separate categories, obviously every country is different so we can I think all agree on that as a starting point. But one thing that is the kind of core of the populist narrative for any populist politician is always, you know, I alone can save you from a corrupt institution or I alone can save you from this corrupt system and in some countries they're promising that to the rising middle class and some countries they're promising that to the declining middle class or the poor, you know, there's a variety of who they make that argument to but it seems like it is offering people an opportunity and encouragement to place the tribal identity of whatever group it is that is being appealed to over the institutions of democracy and over the kind of norms of democracy, these soft guardrails. And so I wonder from your kind of research and study of this, particularly in Latin America and Europe, what the kind of the post that phenomenon looks like? What happens when populism runs its course? What happens to those kind of tribalized identities and tribalized systems? You wanna start with Latin America? Sure. You know, one of the ironies about the, when you look at the populist in Latin America that have been successful, so to speak, although in most cases they've also destroyed their countries, the case of Venezuela being a dramatic case of this, these are people who have succeeded in getting significant majorities of support. So it's much more dangerous when you have a successful populist who is able to then get majorities in the Congress and then with the majorities in the Congress and push in the other direction. That's one of the things that we shouldn't worry as much about in the United States where, you know, the president again has extremely low popularity rating. So that is a phenomenon that's important. And the other thing is that they've, in most cases they've flamed out already. You know, these have been very bad governments. These are governments that are essentially that precisely because they go against the institutions, they wind up ironically destroying the very institutions that elected them to start with and that kept them in office for a while. And that's what we've been seeing in Argentina. That's what we've been seeing in Venezuela. We still haven't seen that necessarily in Nicaragua but that's a very small exception. So beware of majoritarianism and populism because that's where, you know, the rule of law and the countervailing forces of a democratic constitution which is a restraining constitution. And it's a restraining constitution and this is very clear on majorities. That's what democratic constitutionalism is, is to, and our founders were very clear about that. We don't want the passions of the majorities to overcome. So that's why this, all the whole notion of checks and balances becomes a really important element. So I think in that sense we don't have to be concerned about that. And one thing though I do want to add because it hasn't come up in this, the real scourge in the world today is in fact what the Italians call irredenta, you know, which is irredentist politics which is the fact that my community, my identity needs to be sovereign. And that phenomenon for example is not a phenomenon of the Western Hemisphere except for Canada, except for Canada. And then the whole Quebecois thing is sort of receded somewhat. But you know, even when you have all these sort of uprisings in Mexico and so on, nobody has said, let's form a Mayan state. In fact, these subalternate loyalties that want to have sovereign expressions, which is the scourge again of the world today, you know, are still alive and well in Europe as we see with the Catalonias issue where we sell with Brexit and we see with all that kind of thing. There's an irony there. The Americas are the one area of the world where you don't have those kinds of subalternate loyalties fragmenting the politics. In that sense, you know, the development of democratic institutions is probably more promising over the long run precisely because of that. So, one of the seminal... I think Sherry, did you have something to add? Oh wait, go ahead, okay. So one of the seminal moments in the last campaign was when Donald Trump said, and he was addressing the African American community but it resonated more broadly, what the hell have you got to lose? And I think one bright side here, spot here maybe, we're discovering what the hell we've got to lose. And one of the reasons that Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen perform much more poorly than many expected was a sudden realization that maybe we've got a lot to lose if we move in an extreme direction. And it's possible at least that we will see a pendulum swinging back a little bit towards maybe somebody who knows what they're doing, maybe a professional. And it may well be, you know, I've often said, we've had long had this sort of fantasy that we could run government like a business. But if you're running it like Trump University, we may rethink things. If we see the world falling apart, the kind of isolationism and the backlash foreign policy that we're seeing with Trump might be replaced by something that has respect for alliances and an understanding of who the enemies really are. And at the same time, the attitudes of younger people in America, for all these racial divisions, keep in mind we've gone through a sea change in attitudes. People do not see interracial marriage or relationships as an evil thing, which they did 30 or 40 years ago. When we do surveys of younger voters, they don't see race in the same way that we see with older voters. So you could see some positive signs, maybe with generational change and a reaction against inept policies along with the authoritarian ones. So let me say two things. One, to what Norm just said. I think it's really important to recognize that both Vilders and Le Pen got their highest vote shares ever. They weren't powerful enough, popular enough to capture governments, but their vote shares have been increasing now, again, sort of securely for many, many elections. I don't think it's very easy to beat something with nothing. I don't think simply their kind of ludicrous behavior and to us somewhat ridiculous policy suggestions are gonna be enough to dampen their popularity. They're only going to be defeated if mainstream parties come up with better, more attractive alternatives. And that's where I think I'm somewhat more pessimistic. The second thing I'd like to add goes back to, I think perhaps your initial question and maybe something that you were suggesting we think a little bit more about too, which is that there is an important difference, historically and intellectually, between liberalism and democracy. We conflate them in the West because they've existed together for decades after the Second World War. Historically, they have not gone together and in fact, I think one of the things we may be very well-seeing now is that they are separating again in the West, at least. Populists are not anti-democratic. What they are is profoundly anti-liberal and anti-plural. In fact, they claim, not incorrectly, I think, to be coming in precisely because democracy has ceased functioning. It is no longer serving its representative function. It is no longer responding successfully to the challenges that societies face. It is ignoring significant groups of disaffected and dissatisfied voters. And the problem is really that democracy needs someone from the outside, like me, not me, but a populist politician to come in and revitalize it. But the way in which that is suggested to be done is profoundly anti-liberal and anti-pluralistic, which we could talk more about. But again, I think it's very important to distinguish those things, right? No populist, no major populist party or politician in the West claims to be against democracy. This is different from autocrats in other parts of the world. It's different from fascists during the interwar period. But what they do really want to do is profoundly change that liberal or pluralistic part that we thought of incorrectly, for sure in places like the United States, as being inherently intertwined. And therefore, I think responses to what they're suggesting and what they're feeding off have to be slightly different, again, than in places where democracy itself is being overtly thrown into question. Yeah, if you want to take the last answer, I'm pretty curious about how within your kind of framework that you've set up for constitutional democracies decline, what the interplay between democracy and liberalism is within that. So Amanda is referring to an academic paper, which will be a book at some point, which is a luxury that us academics get to see, in which a colleague in the political science department at the University of Chicago and I play through the ways in which institutions of, as Sherry rightly said, a distinctive kind of liberal democracy under the rule of law are unraveled. And what we try to show is that there are fairly predictable pathways and that those pathways are copied from one jurisdiction to another, which is, I think, one reason why I see that the global picture is more salient, perhaps, because I see a migration of policies, anti-democratic policies from one jurisdiction to another, where one way of thinking about what the end point looks like is to look to jurisdictions, actually like Russia, which I think is probably for reasons that we now are all well acquainted with, one of the leading exporters of both specific and specific instruments of anti-democratic unraveling, but also a little bit of a petri dish for the tools of liberal democratic destabilization. One can look at jurisdictions like Russia and see what it means to have democracy without the accoutrements of liberalism or the accoutrements of the rule of law. And I think Russia is the extreme case. I think Hungary is a really interesting intermediate case, in part because Hungary has been economically reasonably successful. And so there is a sense in which the hollowing out of the state has occurred, and the hollowing out of democratic practices has occurred, without a considerable degree of public dissatisfaction. And so I think that there are clear models out there for what the end game looks like. And it has a lot of the bells and whistles of democracy. Whether the groups that were previously excluded from or felt perceived themselves to be excluded from the spoils of national economic success do any better, I think is a very much an open question. Whether they can be persuaded that there are compensating gains in terms of, in the United States, it would be what Du Bois called the wages of whiteness. Whether there are compensating psychic gains that could be had, I think is a very much an open question. And I wanna fully subscribe also to what Sherry described and the diagnosis that she gave. I think one point I would elaborate without disagreeing with her is the central question for an opposition coalition that wants to resist democratic erosion is not what cluster of policies to offer. It is rather the problem of ideology. It is rather, how can we articulate a sense of the nation and a sense of belonging to the nation that reflects the experience of enough people that is a sufficient mirror for enough people that they align themselves emotionally with us. And I think that is a tremendously challenging and difficult political question. And it's a political question that goes to kind of what I would call the ideological heart of democracies. So I think this is a good moment to break and take some questions from the audience. So we have some people who are gonna go around with microphones, you and the pink jacket here in second row. Thank you all so much for a really stimulating conversation. One thing that I have not heard you talking about and I wonder if you would address it, particularly in the American context, I can't talk about it in the cross national context, but when you talk about the crisis of democracy, what about the educational system and the appalling lack of information, not only about government and governmental institutions, but about the nature of democracy on the part of the American electorate. I mean, when you look at the statistics that show the majority of Americans cannot name both of the senators from their state and the vice president and cannot name most of the protections of the constitution, the bill of rights, I mean, you're focusing rightly on a lot of institutions, but what about that very basic part of democracy, the electorate and the way it is being trained for democracy? Is that for a particular panelist? No, anybody who would like to respond, I would appreciate it. Well, I guess I could say having spent a fair amount of time trying to work on civic education that it has been an uphill challenge that is growing more uphill. And as we see funding taken away from education, the attempts to expand civic education, much less things like the arts, is gonna come under even greater challenge. And what we're also seeing is the partisan tribalism and radical ideologies that have metastasized down to many states are reshaping educational systems as well. The textbooks that people have, the fundamental knowledge about the history of the United States, any focus on the constitution and science even are being taken away in a number of states. And so what we know has been a great challenge of just basic knowledge about how the political system is supposed to work much less about the people who are in government or running is gonna become greater, not lesser, I'm afraid. Just real quickly, I agree with that. And let me say another thing is so slightly different. A lot of people have often emphasized in countries that haven't had very strongly strong democratic traditions that what you need to do, of course, to develop a culture of democracy before you get democracy. And this is where in the schools and all your civic education and so on and so forth. Frankly, I think the evidence suggests that that is not necessarily the way in which you're gonna get democratic institutions coming out because in some ways the school for democracy is democracy itself. In other words, as you struggle to build democratic institutions, that's when you are able to be able to teach democracy. This is not something that's done educationally. Sort of tabula rasa. You do it in fact with the practice of democracy. So the key is to try to build democratic institutions at the same time that you're working to try to teach about democratic institutions. You sir, in the second row, break it. Yes. One of the politicians who's often been named as a populist authoritarianism kind of a would-be Trump who didn't quite make it because he was an out of control alcoholic was Senator Joe McCarthy. But in the late 60s, a scholar named Rogan, R-O-G-I-N wrote a book specifically looking at how comparing the populists of the 1890s to Joe McCarthy, especially in Wisconsin where their votes came from. And he said there wasn't much overlap at all. And I'm wondering if anybody's familiar with the book and has read it, which I have not. I only know about it because my graduate school roommate had to do a seminar paper on it. I'm not familiar with that particular book, but there has been a large amount of research on populism and progressivism in the late 19th and early 20th century. And now we have a picture of those voters and those movements as being way more progressive than we used to. That is to say actually more inclusive, less anti-Semitic than was the norm at the time and sort of again, way more influential down the road than we perhaps had previously thought. I mean, one thing I actually thought you were going towards and so perhaps I will, I'm putting words in your mouth and trying to answer a question you didn't ask is thinking about the McCarthy era as an era of polarization. That is to say that what we're experiencing today is certainly something quite important, but it may have some important antecedents in earlier periods in American history. The 60s were a time obviously of immense polarization in many ways over some of the issues we spoke about and certainly the McCarthy era. And so one thing that we might wanna think about is ways in which America managed to overcome those previous periods of polarization. The progressive era and populists in the late 19th century actually were over the long term quite successful in getting their issues incorporated into mainstream American life, which may bring us back perhaps to the point you made about how populism can be salutary under certain kinds of conditions and if existing political actors respond to the issues and challenges that populist movements actually bring up. The back in the purple shirt. Yes. Hi, I've heard a lot about all the income inequality and how that's really eviscerating our democracy and I'd love to hear you all talk about what working people and consumers are going to be able to do to take economic power back when we see the legal system consistently taking those traditional roads away such as the CFPB rule, consumers can no longer sue the banks. Same thing with mandatory arbitration which is the Supreme Court heard opening day. We have the Janus case coming up which may eviscerate public sector unions. So how are in the Yale survey that came out, they said all of the tech billionaires are very progressive on many issues except for workers' rights and unions. And so how are working people going to really bridge that income gap if those traditional pathways are taken away from them? So we have a chapter in our book on Trump as the phony populist and all of the actions being taken by the administration, many of them under the radar. While Congress isn't doing very much, what they have been doing is using the Congressional Review Act to blow up regulations and we see an administration filled with people who are not faithfully executing the law or finding ways to tilt things away from working people. And that's a great challenge. You know, it's interesting if you think of Wisconsin as a kind of microcosm, it was the root of progressivism in the 1920s and 30s with La Follette and then it moved to McCarthy. Then it went to the Gaylord Nelson, Bill Proxmire and Feingold era and now it's the Scott Walker era which started by blowing up unions and now has become the laboratory for voter suppression. And all of that says there has to be a different kind of focus. What my co-authors and I have suggested is what really is needed is a focus on the working class, not the white working class but all working class voters and an agenda that will start to build a new, almost a new GI bill for workers. And if you can get an agenda out there at some point it may be possible to implement it. But the fact is it's gonna be a very, very rough time for working people as worker safety is taken away, as consumer protections are taken away and as their healthcare is taken away. So I actually just wanna press you on that a little bit and you can follow up as well. It seems like something we've seen time and time again in American politics is that it's very difficult to make class identity more salient than race or religious identity. And so very often in these conversations people say like oh we need to kind of not prioritize just the white working class and there's broad agreement about that. But the dynamics of American politics particularly racial politics pose real barriers to that and I wonder if you see any kind of pathways through those barriers. It comes, it's an uphill challenge. There's no doubt and that's one reason why I mentioned the new reconstruction because there are powerful forces that will try and use these things in a different direction. On the other hand, social media can be a positive force as well as a divisive and negative force. And we're seeing it now with sexual harassment. It's just changed and that includes in Silicon Valley where presumably progressive organizations are turning out to be among the most misogynistic that we have and there's a backlash. And it's possible at least I think both to devise a set of policies but also to begin to promote them more aggressively in a fashion that is not so divisive. But I'm not gonna be a Pollyanna here and say that the outcome is inevitable or is anything but a seriously uphill battle. Did you have something you wanted to add on that? So quickly, the question reminds me of discussions that I heard when I was growing up in the 1980s in England where there was this pressing question on the left of what on earth are working class people doing voting for Margaret Thatcher who is dismantling the welfare state, dismantling education, dismantling access to universities that enable and grammar schools that enable people to make their way out of the working class. And the mistake that I now see in those discussions is the assumption that people identify with their economic interest. And the assumption that, I take it that the question comes from the left but the assumption from the left is that one doesn't have to do the hard work of creating a sense of political identity, that it comes kind of pre-package. And I think you can in some fashion make this critique of the Clinton campaign, which I know is not by many people's standards, the left. But it was a campaign built around as many people have noted, policy. Many, many, many policies. And it articulated no understanding of what our shared interests are. And to my mind that challenge, which I'm an academic lawyer, I don't know anything about talking to people. But that to me is the really, really tough challenge in the immediate term. I actually think the institutional challenges and the big structural challenges, you only get to those if you solve that first problem. Sir, in the third book, bro, there. Ian Milheiser with Think Progress. Zees, you'd mentioned that we really didn't become a liberal democracy until 1965. I agree with that. There's a profound thread of racial illiberalism in the United States. There's also a competing thread of illiberalism. There's an economic illiberalism that was ascended in the early 20th century where if a state tried to pass any kind of law that benefited workers, the courts would strike it down on some novel theory. And two things have happened now. One is that both the racial illiberalism and the economic illiberalism, which often operated in independent political spheres for most of our history, have now united under the same partisan banner. And that is new and I think possibly unprecedented in American history. The other thing that has happened is that you're seeing the locus of innovation amongst the conservative forces in the country shifting from the elected branches to the judiciary. So you're not, as one person mentioned in the back, like Congress can't pass anything, but we can dismantle our civil rights laws either by through things like lead batter or through things like arbitration where you can't enforce the law even if you have the right anyway. And so I guess what my question is is we have these two threads that we've seen throughout. We live in a world now where the party that has united under a white nationalist leader now recently had five of its unelected officials dismantled part of the law that allowed us to become a liberal democracy. And we're two Supreme Court vacancies away from returning to the 1920s. Why should we view the moment we're in now as a backslide from an established liberal democracy and not simply as a reversion to norm? Is that a question to me or? No, I don't need to correct that. So I think I agree with the ultimate conclusion that if one is going to assess backsliding it has to be against a relatively short period from about 1965 onwards. I disagree in a couple of ways although I think helpful and productive way. So the first is I think I would trace the connections between capitalism or economic liberalization in your term and the forces of cultural reaction much earlier. And I would look to the work of historians like Kevin Cruz who have identified the ways in which in particular religious conservatives and economic liberals found common cause early in the 20th century. I also think that I would not place emphasis on the Supreme Court in the first part of the 20th century as a pivotal action in the way that you do. I think far more important was the concerted campaign that was carried out with some acquiescence by the courts but where the courts were secondary partners to eliminate communist or socialist parties and strains within the United States from the 19th and 20th onwards. So the United States is a country where the harder left has been systematically suppressed since roughly the period in which it emerges in other European democracies as a relatively vital force. So I think that's sympathetic in the sense that it's adding to your skepticism about the pre-1965 dispensation. Thank you all, this is so interesting. Mr. Valenzuela was talking about how dangerous it can be to have a populist leader who has majoritarian support. I'm actually quite concerned about the dangers of having a populist leader whose support is failing and is very, very low, particularly when that leader is also potentially under investigation for obstruction of justice. There's already talk of impeachment and that leader desperately needs a distraction that is not only going to reinforce his popularity but is going to enable him to consolidate power. And what are the chances that this president will not start a major war? And if that happens, what does that bode for the resilience of our institutions that have thus far been withstanding the pressures that this populist wave has put on them? If I might make a comment along these lines, I actually served in the State Department in the First Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for the Western Hemisphere and then in the Clinton White House, also in the second term at the National Security Council. So some of my work has really been focused on international affairs. I am deeply worried about the fact that a president does have a certain kind of latitude in international affairs, particularly having to do with issues of the codes and so on and so forth and that somehow there could be some kind of a, and I'm not totally reassured that by stacking the administration with a series of former military people or current military people that somehow you're going to get the kind of necessary correctives to that sort of thing, but the country are a little worried about that dynamic. So I share your concern that the damage to the dissimist, I am less worried about the damage that this administration is making to domestic politics, although they're very serious for all the reasons that have been expressed. I'm really worried about the sort of vacuum that the United States is leaving internationally and the mistakes that the United States did very well make internationally to reverse what has been, essentially a U.S.-led effort that goes way back to try to create a rules-based international system where international institutions count and are, so now the other part of your question, I will let maybe some of my colleagues answer, you know, I would hope that Mr. Mueller can continue with his work, you know, and I think that everybody should, you know, the fundamental part of the rule of law there is can that actually succeed? We have to address the large elephants in the room, which are two worst case scenarios. One is a war and what we have to keep in mind is that the system presupposes that you have a president who's kind of normal. There's a, it is, we were not built to have a narcissistic sociopath as a president and the power to use nuclear weapons is his alone and we know that you've had the generals at least talking amongst themselves about how they might have to tackle him. That's a fear. My fear at the moment is that as Mueller gets closer, we will have a president who goes through the Justice Department and finds somebody to fire him and everybody around him and then pardons himself along with everybody else and then goes on Fox and Friends and says, this is a coup attempt. I was elected fair and square and Hillary Clinton and the deep state are trying to steal this election back and I will not let it happen and I want all of my supporters to go to the streets and keep it from happening and maybe that's not a likelihood at this point but if we dismiss it as very, very unlikely, we're making a big mistake. Have a nice day. With that. We can do one more, we can take a question back there. Thank you. My name is Yaya Fonusiewi with United State of Africa 2017 Project Task Force. I'm gonna do what I do with my professors all these years when I studied for my first degree, second degree and my PhD. I want you all there and also the listeners that go study what was happening in organizational theory, analysis and behavior in the 60s and 70s where corporations in the private sectors had to confront radical, unpredictable chaos and change and then apply it to what you all are facing now not just in America but in the world about the attack or all these things that are coming out that you all do not see happening because you sit in there and the two professors have not done a proper conceptual analysis and to see, to submit everything you're talking under change, rapid, unpredictable, unforeseen change and let's see how the political leaders and political institutions will try to cope or adapt like private corporations did when they were facing this in the 60s and 70s. I have a PhD in this field, I was a professor. So if I understood correctly, the question was whether we are seeing rapid and unpredictable change that government institutions are struggling to respond to quickly enough. Does anyone wanna? Well, I mean, I think that that's absolutely a great sort of sketch of precisely what we've been facing in the West for the last several decades. I mean, capitalism, markets have been changing dramatically, that's not your question. So you have a suggestion rather than a question. Yeah, okay, so yeah, it's a suggestion rather than a question. Well, I mean, I think we would probably all differ. I think actually that is as complicated and challenging as the problems that corporate leaders have faced. I actually think, and maybe I'm prejudice because I'm a political scientist, I think the challenges facing governments and other political institutions are at a level of complexity really, really way beyond that. And I think that is definitely part of the disorder and decay that we have been experiencing, namely that we have been facing some really significant changes both economically and socially over the last decades. And I think our political institutions have not done a great job of responding to them. And I think that is a significant part of the populist challenge and decay. I'm not sure what kind of lessons we could learn from corporations, but perhaps that's because I'm not a, I don't have a PhD in corporate behavior, but I wouldn't necessarily transfer problems and responses from one field to the other, although there's generally something that can be learned pretty much from anywhere. You know, I guess very quickly, at least since the early 1970s, as Sherry earlier said, capital has captured a much larger share of rents, economic rents than labor. And that's evidence of a kind of success. But it's a success that I think in some part has led to the dysfunctions and the difficulties of democratic politics that we've been describing. And so there is a disanalogy between capitalists and governments in the sense that a company, unlike a state, does not have to internalize all of the costs of its operation. It can externalize them, as they have successfully done over the last three decades. They can do that too, but that's true. That's true. I think we have time for one more question. So in the very back there, the glasses. Hi, thank you. My name's Averham Reisman. I'm an MA candidate at the Georgetown Democracy and Governance Program. And I guess my question is that, so being in that program, I'm kind of steeped in political development theory right now. And we read Sam Huntington recently, and I have to say that a lot of the way you describe the divide between the rural and urban communities, and the fact that one is more prosperous and educated, it sounds a lot like the green uprising, which Huntington, of course, uses to describe, you know, this post-democratic or post-modernization change. But I guess what I wonder is, without proper institutionalization, with the failures of institutions, whether that's kind of what we're seeing now as well. Can I answer, because I love Sam Huntington. Great. So I think, presuming that you're talking about political order, I mean, the basic argument that he makes here is that there's actually, when you want to understand whether you get political order and political decay, you have to look both at the challenges being faced and at the ability of institutions to respond to them. So it would be wrong simply to look at the absolute level or depth of challenges, right? Because the kinds of challenges that can be handled well, let's say by Canada, cannot be handled well by Somalia. So the other part of the equation is how flexible, adaptable, and effective your institutions are. And I think maybe to kind of sum up some of the points I was trying to make, perhaps, somewhat unsuccessfully during the earlier parts of this conversation, is I think what we're facing today is something that's going on on both ends of that Huntingtonian equation, right? Which is, I do think, in the West, that we have faced significant economic and social challenges over the past several decades, immense amounts of change, right? Much more so in both of those spheres, I think, than in the 30 post-war golden years. But I also think there's been a significant decay in the ability of our institutions to respond to them. And I think that combination has proved, has produced, rather precisely as Huntington would predict, a significant amount of disorder and decay. So I think we need to look at both parts of that equation. The part that we can influence, I think, probably most directly are the institutions in figuring out ways to make them more responsive, more flexible, more adaptable, so that they are better able to deal with what are the really significant challenges that I think society is in the West face today. Well, that seems like a pretty great point on which to wrap things up. Thank you so much to the panelists. This has been a really fascinating discussion. Thank you.