 Thank you. It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Daniel Ziblatt today. I'm going to read a little from his bio because there are a lot of accomplishments that I don't want to miss. Daniel Ziblatt is the Eden Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, where he's also a resident faculty at the Mindegansberg Center for European Studies, and Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His research focuses on democratization, democratic breakdown, political parties, state building, and historical political economy with an emphasis on Europe from the 19th century to the present. His first book was Structuring the State, the Formation of Italy and Germany in the Puzzle of Federalism. He's also the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations. It's also won three other prizes, including the American Sociological Association's 2018 award, the Barrington Moor Book Prize. Professor Ziblatt co-chairs with Steve Levitsky, a new challenges to democracy research cluster at Harvard's Weatherhead Center. Today he's here to talk to us about his most recent work, How Democracies Died, also co-authored with Steve Levitsky. The book is a New York Times bestseller that's currently being translated into 15 different languages. In it they draw on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples from the 1930s in Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela to the American South during Jim Crow. They show us that democracy no longer ends with the Bank, but can die quietly, subverted by the very same leaders who were elected to sustain it. With the wealth of insight into how democracies die and what we can do to prevent such a fate in ours, we are fortunate to have Professor Ziblatt here to conclude this day-long symposium. Please help me welcome him to the stage. It's really wonderful to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I'm actually just very grateful to be part of this public forum, which I wasn't able to attend all of it today, but it's a fascinating and important set of events that have happened today. So I'm talking at the end of the day, so I appreciate you all being here. I'm going to be talking about the health of our democracy and the role of polarization in that. And so in thinking about the health of our democracy, American democracy, I'm going to be trying to answer a question that actually really motivated the book that I wrote with Steve Levitsky and that question is a question I will admit that I never thought I would ask. The question is, could American democracy generally be in danger? Could American democracy generally be in danger? So I approached this question, though, from kind of a distinctive angle along with my co-author, and I will do so also tonight, because I have spent most of my career studying democracies in other parts of the world and in other times. And so from that global angle and with a kind of broader historical view in mind, the first observation that I just want to begin with is that democracies don't die like they used to. So democracies used to die at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, three out of every four democratic breakdowns happened in the form of military coup. Contemporary democracies die in much more subtle ways. They died at the hands of generals, but of politicians, prime ministers, and presidents. Leaders used the various institutions of democracy to subvert it. So democracies today often die constitutionally through parliamentary legislation, through corporate rulings. As a result of this, many citizens often aren't even fully aware that it's happening until it's too late. So in 2011, 12 years into Hugo Chavez's presidency, a majority of Venezuelans according to surveys thought they still lived in a democracy. It was clearly no longer dead. Similar dynamics are visible today in Turkey, a decade after the AKP is sent to power in Hungary and Poland as well. So if democracy now happens at the ballot box instead of in the military barracks, one of the keys to protecting democracy is preventing these democratic figures from getting elected in the first place. And it's here actually where political parties play a really critical role. Political parties are democracies' gatekeepers. They often don't think of them this way, but because they select the candidates, they have incredible power to keep extremists and demagogues out of office. It's when parties fail to play the gatekeeping role that democracies get into trouble. It's really important, as one thinks about polarization and democracy and threats to democracy, to recognize that electoral authoritarians rarely come to power on their own. They almost always come to power with the assist or with an aid from mainstream political parties. Mainstream parties and politicians are often tempted to form fallacy and bargains in the sense with demagoguers outsiders. They often hope they can align with them to tap into some of their popularity and their popular support. And also often with the mistaken belief that they can control the outsider. This is a bargain that almost always backfires. So in the book we recount in Italy in the 1920s, when Mussolini was on the rise in the early 1920s, a local statesman Giovanni Gelletti formed an alliance with Mussolini, concluded him on his party list at election time with the hope that he could tap into some of Mussolini's appeal. In the 1930s in Germany, the German conservative party formed alliances, loose alliances, as she joined proclamations and programs with Hitler's party, which was a marginal party in the late 1920s. This only paved the way for Hitler's assent to power. In early 1933, when Franz von Poppen, the German conservative statesman, elevated Hitler to chancellor, he assured his conservative friends, don't worry, and the quote from von Poppen is, don't worry, within two months will have pushed Hitler so far into a cornmeal squeal. So both Italy and Germany, in many cases, driven by kind of short-term political motivations, politicians abandoned their gatekeeping role. And this often turns out to be a tragic miscalculation. Now in the United States, political parties have actually done a pretty good job of gatekeeping. This is important because in the United States, there's actually been no shortage of extremist demigods. You know, we don't have to look at, just in the 20th century alone, you could think of Father Kaufland in the 1930s, the right-wing radio personality, you have tens of millions of listeners, Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, Robert Anti-Semite, Huey Long in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, George Rawls, the segregationist governor in the 1960s. It's important to kind of list this cast of characters, because Gallipoli data exists going back to 1930s, showing that each of these figures garnered around 35% approval ratings. So there's really nearly a continuous strand in American history, along a very robust liberal tradition, not the illiberal tradition. You know, I don't think there's some kind of dramatic transformation that's taking place in the preferences of American voters. There's been a kind of nearly continuous strand. So the real question is how are these types of figures kept up, despite the fact that they were very popular. And the argument we make in the book is that they were kept up mostly through the presidential selection process. So prior to 1972, the way that we selected our presidents was in what was often described at the time as a system of smoke-filled back rooms. I mean, this was not a very transparent system, not an inclusive system, but this was a system that worked quite effectively at keeping demagogues out. Party leaders worked as gatekeepers. What this meant was that party leaders who worked up close with politicians knew how they dealt with stress and adversity and knew who might be potential demagogues. These politicians at convention time got together and kept out these sorts of figures. So despite all of the shortcomings of this old system, and I wouldn't ever advocate going back to the old system, we have to recognize that this system had a pretty good record of keeping demagogues out. And so what happened in 2016? Well, first of all, Americans, of course, adopted a system of binding primaries in 1972. So this is far more transparent, far more open, but it also weakened party leaders' role as a gatekeeper. And so now it was much easier for a demagogue to make it through the kind of obstacle course to a nomination. So that's the first point. But even more critically in a lot of ways, even after candidate Trump won the nomination, Republican party leaders failed a second time, gatekeepers failed a second time, when they clearly, all Republican leaders publicly and privately expressed the view that Donald Trump might be a not-fit-for-office or they thought he might be a demagogue. Yet nonetheless, they didn't do the one thing that the great Spanish political scientist Juan Lenz recommends that politicians do in facing somebody who clearly is a threat to the established order, democratic order, which is to endorse somebody from the other side. It's of course always difficult to run against, to go against one's own side. It means that a party might face defeat. It's handing power over to the other side of the tension. But this is really a critical thing that might have made a difference. So this is all sort of background to say that in 2016, the United States, we argued for the first time in two centuries, elected somebody to office, presidential office to the presidency was a clearly explicit, visible threat to democratic politics. But this of course does not mean our democracy is doomed. This is in a way where political institution and polarization enters the story. Because it turns out Americans, of course, place a lot of faith in our constitution. We have the oldest and most successful written constitution in the world. And our system of checks and balances has constrained many ambitious politicians. But constitutions are not self-enacting. They don't just enforce themselves. They don't work out of that. Just to give you an example, Argentina, a country that my co-author has spent a lot of time studying, is a country that has a constitution that's nearly identical to the American constitution beginning in the 19th century. And yet Argentina experienced six military coups over the course of the 20th century. So the point is constitutions, it's not just the words on the page that matter. And we make the case that constitutions work best when they are reinforced by robust democratic norms or unwritten rules. So in our book we focus on two norms in particular. One, we call mutual toleration. And essentially it's accepting the legitimacy of your rivals, so of our partisan opponents. So this means no matter how much we disagree or even dislike our partisan rivals, that we recognize they have the right to compete for office and if they beat us together. And so in other words, we don't treat our rivals as enemies. The second key norm is a little less familiar perhaps, which is the norm that we call institutional forbearance. Forbearance means essentially acting with restraint in exercising one's legal right, one's legal power. So it serves as an underutilization of power. And we don't often think about forbearance in politics, but if you're just thinking in American political setting, what does the President can actually do according to the written word on the page, according to the written law? The President can pardon whoever he or she wants at any point for any reason. The President with a congressional majority can change the size of the Supreme Court. You don't like how the Supreme Court is ruling, you can increase the Supreme Court's size to 11, 13, whatever, perfectly legal. The President's agenda is stalled in Congress. The President can circumvent the process and rule by executive order. The Constitution, of course, doesn't prohibit such action. Think about what Congress can do. Congress, the Senate can use its right of advising, can set to block every single cabinet appointee, to block all judicial appointments. The Congress can impeach a President on any grounds it wants. So the point is that politicians can exploit the letter of the law in ways that eviscerate the spirit of the law. This tendency to exploit the letter of the law to eviscerate the spirit of the law is what we call constitutional article drawn on our legal scholar Mark Tushin. So if you look at any failing or failed democracy in the world, today or in the past, you'll find an abundance of constitutional hardball. So Argentina under Barone, Spain and Germany in the 1930s, Venezuela under Chávez, contemporary Hungary, Poland and Turkey. Constitutional hardball is how even a brilliantly designed constitution gets subverted and the system of checks and balances gets subverted. It's how judicial and legislative institutions get transformed from watchdogs into lapdogs. It's how checks and balances degenerate into gridlock. What prevents the system of checks and balances from descending into constitutional hardball that can wreck democracies is this notion of forbearance. It's a shared commitment to exercising restraint and deploying one's institutional broadness. It's rooted in a commitment to the sphere of the law. So think just about presidential term limits. So prior to 1951, of course, the United States placed no legal limits on the president's ability to seek reelection. So legally, if re-elected, presidents could be presidents for life. Yet George Washington, of course, famously didn't seek a third term, stepped down after two terms, and for nearly 150 years, no president ever even sought a third term. So even incredibly ambitious and popular presidents, Jefferson, Jackson, and U.S.S. Graham, was an unwritten removal of self-frustration. Take the filibuster. It's another example of forbearance. Technically, a Senate minority can use the filibuster to block every piece of legislation. But historically, the filibuster was used really as a weapon of last resort. Between 1917 and 1960, there were only 30 filibusters, so fewer than one a year. So these two norms, these unwritten rules of mutual toleration on one hand, forbearance on the other hand, are what my co-author and I think of as the soft guard rails of our democracy. These unwritten rules prevent normal political competition from descending into partisan fights to the death that have killed democracies in Latin America in the 60s and 70s and Europe in the 1930s. America has not always had these soft guard rails. It wasn't born with them. Our founding fathers really actually never got the idea of really a mutual toleration. And that's because this idea of legitimate opposition, the idea that the opposing party has a right to compete for office, was really just a notion that was developing in the late 18th century. So as brilliant as the founding fathers may have been, they couldn't quite wrap their heads around this idea. So under President Washington and President Adams, the governing federalist party regarded the emerging Jeffersonian opposition as seditious as working for revolutionary France. Of course, the Jeffersonians thought the federalists were monarchists and wanted to bring back British rule. This is a pretty intense polarization. Both sides view the other side as agents of foreign powers. And both sides engage the egregious harbour, corpac, and other forms of harbour. The passage of the Aliens' Edition Act. This is an intense harbour. And it's really not until a post-revolutionary generation that this norm of mutual toleration or accepting again your rivals as legitimate emerge. But it didn't last long. In the 1850s, Southern Democrats regarded the new Republican Party as an existential threat because Republicans were anti-slavery. And as slavery emerged on the agenda, both sides regarded the other side as traitors to the Republic. As norms eroded, these newly emergent guardrails began to break down. The politics took on a kind of anything-goes character. So one historian accounts 125 different acts of violence on the floor of the Congress and the lead-up to the Civil War, so fistfights, canyons, stabbings on the floor of the Congress. Mutual toleration obviously collapsed during the Civil War and it remained low for a generation after the Civil War. So during reconstruction, both sides regarded each other as existential threats. This resulted in the 1860s and 70s of an abundance of hardball politics, corpaking. Supreme Court nominees were blocked. Supreme Court size was expanded, fraudulent election in 1876. But for very tragic reasons, and this comes again back to the theme of polarization that we discuss in our book, beginning in the late 19th century, Democrats and Republicans began to accept one another as legitimate and began to avoid destabilizing acts of hardball. And in particular, what prompted us was that Republicans gave up on the agenda of racial equality. They gave up on the agenda of reconstruction. Republicans allowed Democrats to disenfranchise blacks in the South. So Southern Democrats no longer view Republicans as an existential threat. The kind of tragic truce was achieved. Mutual toleration was restored. Forbearance re-emerged. But this great tragic irony that we still live with today is that our norms of mutual toleration and forbearance preconditions for democracy were achieved at the price of racial exclusion. And so our democracy was fundamentally incomplete and flawed. But this ultimate, at the beginning of the 20th century, constitutional hardball began to diminish. There was no impeachments, no successful corp acting. Senators were judicious in the use of the filibuster and the right to advise a consenting. And outside of wartime, presidents were framed from acting unilaterally, circumventing Congress in the courts. So for more than a century, our system of checks and balances worked in the 20th century. But again, they worked because they were reinforced by these norms. In some sense, we could think of ambiguous norms of toleration forbearance. Now as we show in our book, these norms have been unraveling in the United States of the last quarter century. We see this dramatically accelerated over the last several years. But again, it began long before the current political moment and really began, we argue, in the 1990s. Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House in 1995, began in the early 1990s to speak. He told his Republican allies in Congress to use terms like trade, anti-flag, anti-family trade, when describing demographics. Gingrich was also a master of constitutional hardball. He engineered the first modern government shutdown in 1985. The Republican House carried out a partisan impeachment. It was the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton. It was the first presidential impeachment in 130 years. So the process of normal erosion really accelerated in the 2000s. During the Obama year, the Tea Party movement radicalized the Republicans, encouraging them to abandon mutual tolerations. Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Runi Giuliani, Mike Huckabee told their followers that President Obama did not love America, that Obama and the Democrats weren't real Americans. The further movement, of course, went a step further questioning whether President Obama was even really born in the United States. Fundamentally questioning his right to be president. So I'll just give you one example of one Colorado congressman, Mike Hoffman, declared at one point, I do not know if President Obama was born in the United States. But I do know that in his heart he's not an American. He's just not an American. Hillary Clinton, of course, received similar treatment. A Republican presidential candidate on live national television at the Republican convention led the Republican chant to block her up. Now, America has always obviously had an extremist fringe. That was going to my earlier point here, but this was no longer French politics. These were national Republican leaders. This was the vice presidential candidate in 2012. This was the presidential candidate in 2016. This was live on national television at the Republican convention. So leading Republicans were now questioning the basic legitimacy of their rivals for office. So this worries me. This worries shouldn't worry us all because what we've learned from studying democracies in other parts of the world is that in the absence of mutual toleration, if you regard your political rivals as enemies, they were attempted to abandon forbearance and engage in an escalating spiral of heart-ball in order to defeat them. We view our partisan rivals as a threat, as existential threats. We've grown tempted to use any means necessary to stop them. And that's exactly what has begun to happen. Politicians have begun to throw forbearance to the wind. So when Republicans won control of Congress in 2010, they adopted a strategy about right obstructionism. Filibuster use, which had already been increasing under Democrats and Republicans reaching all-time high, it was actually more filibusters during President Obama's second term than all of the years between World War I and the end of the raving presidency combined. President Obama responded with constitutional heart-ball with his own. When the Congress refused to pass immigration reform or climate change legislation, he circumvented Congress and made policy of the executive orders. The action was technically legal, but again violated the spirit of the Constitution. So by the end of the Obama presidency, Republicans, in our view, seemed willing to adopt any means necessary to stop Democrats and prevent people from winning. So 15 states, all of them Republican-led, adopted strict voter-ranking laws, between 2000 and 2016. And most study of all, in my mind at least, was the U.S. Senate's 2016 decision not to allow President Obama to even hold hearings on Merrick Barlow to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Scalia's death. This was the first time this had happened since 1866. All of this was before Donald Trump had elected. So the problem is not just that Americans elected a demagogue in 2016. It's that Americans elected a demagogue at a point which our soft bar rails have been corroborated. Okay, so why is all of this happening? We argue what's shredding our norms is polarization. Republicans and Democrats have come, according to surveys, and I think generally there's lots of evidence of this, have come, Democrats and Republicans have come to fear and loathe each other. In 1960, 5% of Republicans said they would be displeased with their trial in their area of Democrat. Today, that number is 50%. According to a recent Pew survey, 45% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats said the other party's policies threaten the nation's well-being. 49% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats say the other party makes them a threat. We have not seen this kind of partisan hatred since the 19th century. This isn't just traditional liberal conservative polarization. People don't fear and loathe each other over taxes and healthcare. Today's partisan differences run much deeper. They're about race, religion, and way of life. Our parties have changed dramatically over the last 50 years. So in the 60s and 70s, Republicans and Democrats are culturally actually quite similar. There are huge policy differences, of course. But demographically, the party's leadership were overwhelmingly white and Christian. Three big changes have taken place. First, the Civil Rights Movement and the achievement of full civil rights and voting rights for all Americans in the 1960s led to a massive and gradual migration of Southern whites from the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, while African Americans became predominantly Democratic. Second, the U.S. experienced a massive wave of migration in the wake of immigration reform in the mid-60s, and most of these immigrants ended up in the Democratic Party. And third, by the time of the Reagan era, evangelical Christians who had been evenly split between the Democrats and Republicans flocked to the Republican Party. So what does all of this mean? Well, today the Democratic and Republican parties are culturally and racially quite distinct. The Democrats are mostly a rainbow coalition of urban and educating secular whites in a range of ethnic minorities. The Republicans, by contrast, remain overwhelmingly white and Christian. This is important because white Christians aren't just a group. They were once the majority, and they once used to sit unchallenged atop this country's social, economic, cultural, and political hierarchies. They filled the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and governor's managers. They were the pillars of local communities. They were the CEOs, the newscasters, the movie stars, and college professors. And they were critically the faces of both the Democratic and Republican Party. Those days, of course, are long gone, but losing a majority and losing one's dominant social status can be deeply threatened. Many Republican voters, of course not all, but many feel that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. And that ultimately is what we are driving in polarization. The problem is that extreme polarization can kill democracies. This is a major lesson of the failure of democracies in Latin America in the 60s and 70s and Europe in the 1930s. When politics is so deeply polarized that each side views a victory by the other side as intolerable beyond the pale, the democracy is in trouble. When an opposition victory becomes intolerable, you, of course, begin to justify using extraordinary means to stop this. Things like violence, elections brought, military kids. Of course, Americans haven't reached that point, but we have reached a point where according to exit polls in 2016, one in four Trump voters, one in four people who voted for Trump believed he was unfit for office. The important exit polls, they still preferred him with a Democratic candidate. We've reached a point where, according to Gallup, polls over the last couple of years, Republicans have a more favorable view of a lot of your food than the new ability content. These are dangerous levels of polarization. Donald Trump, of course, is a part of the symptom of that polarization. He's not just a positive. And so his departure won't put an end to it. So what has happened in the last 18 months since we wrote our book? Let's say there's good news and bad news. Good news and not-so-good news. The good news is that America's Democratic antibodies, I think, remain strong. Trump administration, of course, has confronted lots of pushback on multiple fronts from media, from civil society, from the courts, from law enforcement agencies. It also faces a robust political opposition. The last year's midterm elections were really critical. It shows that the United States is not like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela, where authoritarian governments esteem ruled the opposition. The U.S. has a strong opposition, and a strong opposition has ushered in the era of divided government. We're going to train President Trump and make it less likely that he can be a concentrated power for a used government. But the not-so-good news is that the underlying problems of polarization and normal erosion haven't gone away. Our system of checks and balances only works when there's a minimum of mutual toleration of forbearance. Remember, without forbearance, politicians play any means necessary to win, and so they turn to constitutional hardcore. When that happens, divided government can very quickly descend into gridlock, an institutional warfare. This is a world of stolen Supreme Court seats, court packing, partisan impeachment, government shutdowns, declarations of national emergency. That's the danger I think we face today is dysfunctional government. So a few months ago, Steve and I met with a group of U.S. senators, and one of them told us that he expected that we'll never again see a successful Supreme Court nomination when the president's party doesn't also control the Senate. So in other words, Merrick Arland is about to become the rule, not the exception. So our democracy, I think, is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. And seeing the government shutdown, the longest government shutdown in history, followed by threats to declare national emergency, these are symptoms of this basic dysfunction. So in the face of polarization, I think it's really important to think about, can our government actually respond to the genuine crises that we face, climate change, stagnant wages, and so on. So what can be done, and I'll kind of conclude with these some reflections on this. Well, for one, I think it's clear that the Republican Party has to change. It has to become a more diverse party. As long as the Republican Party remains an overwhelmingly white Christian party in the society as diverse as ours, they'll be prone to extremism and desperate acts of constitutional hard work. So I'd just like to kind of develop this point, because I think it's actually really great. Democracy requires that parties learn to lose gracefully. This means that when we lose, we accept defeat, we go home, we regroup, and we get ready for another political battle the next day. We don't cheat when we're about to lose. That's what Democrats do. But for parties to lose gracefully, two conditions really have to hold. First of all, parties have to believe that they stand a chance of winning in the future, and they also have to believe that losing will not bring ruinous consequences. When these two conditions don't hold, losing gracefully tends to go out the window. When politicians fear that they can't win the next election, and in context of extremely high polarization, politicians' time horizons short. They say the future shouldn't be damned, and we'll use any means necessary to all want to power that. In other words, polarization and desperation need politicians to play dirty. This is what happened to German conservatives in the early 20th century. Conservatives were terrified by the prospect of giving the working class the right to vote. They viewed full suffrage not just as an attack on their right to government, but as an attack on the entire social order that they dominated. So they clayed dirty in terms of election fraud and repression of the whole lot of power. Or think about southern Democrats after the Civil War. Reconstruction of the 15th Amendment, brought widespread black enfranchisement across the South, because African Americans represent a majority or a near majority in most southern states there, and enfranchisement represented a threat to southern Democrats. So it challenged not only electoral dominance, but again, it threatened to overturn the dominant social order. So Democrats played dirty. 11 post-Confederate states class laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residence requirements to effectively eliminate African Americans from the right to vote. So black turnout in the South fell from 61% in 1880 to 2% in 1912. Contemporary Republicans, I fear, something similar is happening today. As currently constituted the Republican Party's medium-term electoral prospects, despite their current electoral success, or actually did, Republicans are overwhelmingly a white Christian party, and white Christians are a declining portion of the electorate. Not only that, the percentage of the electorate, younger voters are now increasingly overwhelmingly Democrat. So like the old southern Democrats, Republicans have to play dirty, attacking norms, changing the rules that violate basic Democratic rules. We could talk about lots of instances of them. The only way for all of this to change is if the Republican Party itself diversifies. If and when that transformation happens, and I think it will, I hope it will, our politics can be polarized. What about Democrats? There's been a lot of talk of Democrats learning to fight like Republicans. It's time to fight dirty is the name of Greece's book. Democrats are going to break the rules, Republicans are going to break the rules than Democrats should policy. So I really disagree with this. I think in a context of polarization Democrats must avoid the temptation to fight like Republicans. They can, of course, push aggressive policy agenda. They can push for democratizing reforms of our political systems, automatic voter registration, independent commissions to do redistricting, but they must continue to abide by the norms of our political system. So, in other words, don't push for impeachment unless the Mueller report warns it. As long as institutional and electoral channels exist, Democrats must avoid the temptation to respond in time. If not, it's another term in the spiral. In our experience, studying other democracies, other parts of the world, this spiral doesn't end well. I think Democrats, in fact, have good medium-term prospects, unlike Republicans. And so putting our institutions at risk is actually not in Democrats in the light of self-interest. And so more broadly, and I'll end it on this note, when we talk about the crisis of democracy and think about that moment that we're in, there's often a sense that we're kind of in a moment that's in our politics, it's very similar to global work. It's kind of an analogy to people implicitly having to learn. The world is moving in one direction. There's rising tides of disaffection, dissatisfaction, dysfunction, and things are only getting worse. History is only moving in one direction. Now, if this assessment were correct about our politics, desperate measures would be needed. And perhaps forbearance should be available. But I'd like to suggest a different metaphor drawn from the natural world. The metaphor not of global warming, but of earthquakes. The crisis of democracy while severe may be like an earthquake. Like with earthquakes never to be deep in real fault lines of polarization that are driving it. And the crisis can itself do dramatic damage. But democratic crises, perhaps like democracy like earthquakes, tend to come and go. The biggest challenge is to get through the crisis with the institutions intact. We have to make sure that our institutions are built strong enough both to get through the earthquake and for life after the earthquake. And to do this, we can't take it. We cannot attack our institutions by playing hardball and simply too much at stake.