 Good afternoon, you're very welcome to this latest IIEA webinar on the upcoming U.S. presidential election and all things American. I'm delighted to welcome Ed Luce, who is U.S. National Editor of the Financial Times and a weekly columnist with that newspaper. And as many of you will know, his columns in recent times have not made one more cheerful about the country in which he resides. Ed is no stranger to us at the IIEA and we are yet again grateful to him for taking the time to join us virtually. By way of bio, Ed has previously served as the FT's Washington Bureau Chief, South Asia Bureau Chief and Capital Markets Editor, among other roles. Outside journalism, he worked as a speechwriter for Larry Summers during his time as U.S. Treasury Secretary. He's also written a number of books, his most recent one, The Retreat of Western Liberalism was published in 2017. And it was his first book on that most fascinating of country's India that I spotted on my bookshelf a while back, which prompted me to ask Ed to join us again. There really is a lot to discuss this lunchtime and the stakes could hardly be higher as we head towards perhaps the most crucial presidential election in modern U.S. history. In terms of format, we're going to do it slightly differently this lunchtime with a more in conversation style discussion, which is entirely on the record. We will, of course, engage with the audience, so please submit questions and comments at any time via Zoom's Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. You can also join the conversation on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. So, Ed, perhaps we'll start at what's going on more widely in American society and what sort of changes you observe and you see. Parallels are often drawn between the 1960s, the late 1960s and the current period in the U.S. How similar, how different, how is American society evolving? Well, I should sort of first of all give the health warning that I was born in the late 1960s, so I had no direct observation to make that comparison. But clearly, the extent to which we are in a culture war rather than a sort of more business as usual political debate about tax rates and spending, there is a strong 1960s parallel and this is partly generational as well, which of course has a very strong 1960s echo and there is a lot of street action to put it mildly. That said, there's nothing like the street action today, even if you include cities like Portland and Louisville, Kentucky and Chicago and elsewhere. There's nothing like the action today that we saw in terms of America's burning cities in the late 60s, early 70s. The source of a lot of the concern about domestic stability today comes from more from the right than it does from the left. White supremacist groups, QAnon affiliated groups, groups with names, you know, like the Oath Keepers and the Minutemen and the Patriot, this, the Patriot, that. There is a second amendment visibility to these paramilitary groups that you saw on the left with the Black Panthers and other groups in the late 60s. It's now a lot more on the right, but in terms of the sort of broad echoes of a country that is breaking down over non-divisible cultural differences, there is a striking parallel there and that makes it a pretty unstable environment for an election to be held. And on the issue of culture war, there's also a question about, you know, what is driving change? Some people argue that it's the populism has been driven by economic factors, greater insecurity, people are feeling greater insecurity and this is helping populists. Others, and maybe they're not, you know, mutually exclusive. Others mentioned culture wars and this sense of that things are more important than that, that your cultural perspective is more important than your position on taxes, et cetera. Where do you see the economic insecurity part feeding into it, if at all? Oh, I think it's a very strong part of it. And I think there's been a kind of false distinction made between either this is about culture or this is about economics. It's they're not mutually exclusive. I think what happens when you see the hollowing out of the middle class, some going down, some going up, but the middle, that sort of great stabilizing middle being depleted over a generation or more, is an analog polarization in politics because the economy has been polarizing. There's been a lot more going to the winners and a lot less going to the losers. So it's it's got a parallel in what happens to the middle of politics. Men have been particularly in their own eyes victims of this hollowing out the traditional blue collar job, the kind of job where in the 1970s, you could have your wife stay at home and still afford to fund your kids college. That kind of job is for somebody without a postgraduate degree, extremely rare nowadays. So that sort of post war bargain is pretty much dead, but the aftershocks of its death go on. And I think what it does is it makes people insecure. It makes people ready to scapegoat and it makes the material of American society more susceptible to cultural appeals by unscrupulous characters. And so we have got this sort of seeming paradox that the breakdown of the economic social contract is leading to racial identity politics. I don't see that as an actual contradiction. I think that's pretty much in a very simple form. What we've been seeing over the last over the last few years, just to put it in sort of context for us in Europe. It was always striking to me that when the French economist Thomas Piketty published his book in France, nobody didn't get any traction. When it was published in the US, it became a huge phenomenon and it only got picked up in Europe once the Americans started talking about it. I just wonder in my own senses that inequality issues are much less important in European politics than they are in US politics. Do you think that's do you think that there is a different dynamic around the extremes of inequality in the US versus Europe? That's a good question because normally you'd have the opposite that any focus on inequality is immediately shut down as class warfare in the American idiom. But I think it's become acceptable because it is so visibly extreme. The American creed is essentially meritocracy. It's essentially that if you're talented and you wipe the sweat from your brow that you put the effort in, that this system allows you to get ahead and create similar opportunities for your children. And it's just not a reflection of the reality that most Americans face. They see that the vast majority of students who make it to Ivy League are in the top two, three percentage points of income brackets. They see that roughly a quarter of Ivy League students are legacy students, meaning one parent went to the same institution. And they see the prohibitive cost of health care and education inflation over the last 30, 40 years. The inflation measure doesn't really capture that. It captures more ordinary day-to-day goods where inflation has been quiescent for a generation. If you had inflation measured by health care and education, we would have had hyperinflation in the last generation. So those basic sort of means of mobility have been put more and more out of reach of most Americans. And I don't think the elites of left or right really get that or feel it or sympathize with it. And that in turn aggravates this sense of resentment against elites that you're seeing displayed in different ways. You know, in some corners it's support for Bernie Sanders. In others it's falling prey to Trumpianism. But you're seeing people lose any tolerance for normal politics. And I think there's a reason for it. It's not just because they're deplorable people who, you know, have deep prejudices. I think they are very strained people who are finding it extremely hard to make ends meet and don't really see an end in sight to this. So you do feel the social escalator has at least slowed and not broken down entirely. The elites don't perceive that, but you think more and more people do. Like that is something you feel people really do feel. Yes, and if you look at the numbers, you know, I think the latest from Gallup was 37% of Americans believe that children will be better off than they are. That's a pretty extraordinary number. 60, almost two-thirds of Americans think essentially we're going down. So I think that is a pretty widely held view. Look, the elites, you know, I shouldn't generalize too much about the elites because there are clearly two different elites. There is a conservative elite and there is a liberal elite. But the liberal elite do seem to be much more concerned with racial justice than they do with broad-based economic upliftment. And they do seem to be happy on very good grounds to talk about historic victimhood for non-white working-class people, but to talk in much more sort of thatcherite Reaganite terms about white blue-collar people as if they are to blame for their own plight. So I think tactically speaking, as well as substantively speaking, the Democratic elites have misplayed the blue-collar white vote, which after all still remains the largest single category of voters in the United States. So I just think it's negligent politics on a tactical level. I also think it's just substantively wrong to imply they're to blame for their own plight because it takes a lot of resources to educate your children to the degree that the elites are. It's just not realistic to think people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps with the cost of education and the extreme competitiveness of education being what it is nowadays. So I think that the healthcare and education thing is very different from Europe. And those, as you say, the inflation, the rising cost of healthcare and inflation, really there's no country in Europe that remotely resembles the U.S. in those terms. An issue that there may be a difference as well either side of the Atlantic is immigration. You know, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants. How do you see immigration as an issue? Is it becoming a more important issue? Will it be an issue for the election? It's not as big an issue in this election as it was in 2016. I think to some degree it's been supplanted by the whole George Floyd situation and Black Lives Matter situation and Trump's response that I am the candidate of law and order and that a Biden presidency would unleash anarchy in our cities, in our democratic run cities, it is meant that that's taken more of the heat as an issue, as an identity issue. Trump remains very strongly anti-immigration and I'm including legal immigration. He's making legal immigration more difficult as well as illegal immigration. But if you remember in 2016 he did promise to build a wall with Mexico and get Mexico to pay for it and of course neither of those things have happened. So he's not exactly in a position to run on that accomplishment and maybe to some degree he's focusing on this because this is a better way of, how do I put it politely, increasing the enthusiasm of his base? Our former finance minister, Alan Jukes, asks how important to US voters are environmental issues, rejoining the Paris Accord, repairing the damage that Trump has done to environmental protection agencies and policies would throw that one at you? I think that's a very good question. I was doing a panel last week with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and they do some very good surveys of American public opinion and they listed the top five issues for Democrats and the top five issues for Republicans and what was really striking was that there was not one overlap between these issues. It was like two different universes, two different sets of issues. Climate change, the threat of climate change was second on the Democratic list. First was the pandemic but climate change was second. Now I think partly that's because you've seen the fires, the pool of smoke from the West Coast fires in the last few weeks spread across the country here in Washington DC was remarkable. There was a day or two last week where it was sunny but it didn't feel sunny because there was this deep haze preventing the sun from breaking through from 3,000 miles away. So I think events like that really underline. They bring home to people the reality of global warming. I suspect the pandemic in a funny way has two because it is a Deus Ex machina. It's something that's come from outside our normal business in a way that climate change does too. But that wasn't anywhere on the Republican list and if you look at polls of Republican voters Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Accords remains very popular and the idea that global warming is essentially a Chinese plot to make America less competitive is a widely held view amongst conservatives in the United States. So I think I would sort of almost broaden your question to say what is the view on science amongst the US electorate? And it's striking that those groups that are saying that global warming is either not man-made or exaggerated or is susceptible to an easy technological solution are the same groups that are questioning the science of wearing a mask or having lockdowns or social distancing regulations. There is a broader skepticism there to authority, to expertise, to public pronouncements and to science in general I think on America's conservative right and really the opposite of that on the left perhaps a sort of almost willfully overtrusting sort of approach to public announcements. Could I in terms of how that's communicated, could it maybe bring in an issue issues around the media and the role of the media in the US? How do you feel the media has changed? Has it become more polarized to reflect society? Is there a dynamic where the media society becomes more polarized, media becomes more polarized, people enter into echo chambers, they don't hear other sides? Is that a very real phenomenon there and has it affected the quality of journalism in the United States? It's a very real phenomenon. I think the horse is bolted on that one. I think the answer I would give you now is very little different to the answer I would have given you in 2016. It's the same but only more so that people, the idea and the Jefferson and others so sort of poetically sketched over a public being a place where there is a public square and you may disagree in that public square but you're all in the public square. That's been put to rest for a long time now. There is no public square. There are lots of different public squares and they don't seem to have adjoining passages between them. The role of what is still called the mainstream media or maybe the traditional media, the network, TV stations, the big broadsheet print, the role of those in 2016 was to see Trump as an extraordinary business opportunity. He got eyeballs onto the website. He got viewers onto the TV. He was good for business. Hillary Clinton was perceived to be going to win anyway. This excessive coverage of her emails, which looks so quaint nowadays. What was the problem? I'm not really sure. Still sure what the problem was. This lavish attention on her emails and the idea that Trump was just good for business meant that essentially people were given permission, people who consumed the mainstream media were given permission to vote for a third party, to vote or not vote at all. About a fifth of Bernie Sanders voters either didn't vote in 2016 or voted for Trump or possibly for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, all of which helped Trump win. The media narrative today of the mainstream media is that this is a really close election and it's having the opposite impact on voters. It's not giving them permission to vote for Trump or not to vote or to vote for a Green Party. It's panicking people into saying, well, we're going to vote. We're going to vote. We have to get this man out. Now, I don't think it's any more accurate than the 2016 meta narrative amongst the mainstream media. I don't think it is that close. I think Biden's got double the lead that Hillary had and that's been a consistent lead all year. Well, since the spring at any rate. I don't think it's any more accurate. I do think, though, it's having the opposite effect on potential Democratic voters and people in the middle to galvanize the turnout for Biden. Now, we've got a lot of really floods of questions coming in. Let me just reassure viewers that we'll come to sort of international relations in the second half. We'll deal with sort of US domestic politics in the first half of this. So I'll put those questions later before going to some of the questions that are coming in the domestic politics. Could I also ask you how business is reacting to this polarization? In a democracy, companies generally don't want to be associated with one political party for fear of alienating those who support another. With polarization, is this proving to be a difficulty for businesses in terms of just doing business and human resources, etc. Is that something you picked up on? Business tends to be, most forms of business tend to be pro-Republican in traditional times, but it's much closer than you would expect and there's been some industries you'd attribute to the right and some you'd attribute to the left. So, for example, the defense industrial complex would be seen as pro-Republican and Silicon Valley would be seen as pro-liberal and Wall Street's the swing vote. You know, some elections that go with the Republican and others like with Obama in 2008, Wall Street pretty decisively came in behind Obama. All that's really changed. Trump's such a different kind of president that the normal laws of the normal patterns of money and politics in America have changed. It's not at all clear to me that Silicon Valley is pro-democrat anymore, for example. Trump's robust stance against China and the idea of a bifurcated global internet is actually something that the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world have been playing at quite aggressively. They like low taxes. They don't like what Elizabeth Warren's talking about in terms of regulation and potentially anti-trust action. Wall Street, I think is pretty much split. I don't think it's strongly pro-Trump. I think it's been enjoying the party in the stock market. But there are also serious questions about whether Trump would break the goose that lays the golden eggs, which is globalization. And Biden's seen as a more normal candidate. Defense too. Well, there's been a lot of cozy relationships between the Pentagon under Trump and the defense industrial complex. But he's not a conventional Republican in foreign policy and defense either. And Biden is seen as a more business as usual person in terms of American alliances, America's presence globally. So I think there's more ambivalence there. Generally speaking, though, for business across the board, this is not a time they feel involved in to put their head above the parapet. This is an era of ultra-caution. Politics is more unpredictable. It's more dangerous. You can get decapitated. So keeping Sturm seems to be the council that most CEOs have been receiving. Okay. Okay. We've got one here. Americans were long noted and admired for their civility. Yet sadly, that appears to have changed. An English academic friend of mine was back in the U.S. about a year ago, after an absence of 20 years. She told me on her return visit that she could not wait to leave as people were so angry everywhere. What accounts for this apparent change in Americans' demeanor? That's from Louise Brennan. Could I ask speaker questioners just to write in their affiliation? Because I can see your name, but I can't see your affiliation. So it's always good to know that. So you could just add that in. I think Louise Brennan is from Trinity, but yeah. Do you sense, is there anger? Is this and what accounts for it if people are so much more angry these days? It's really funny. Louise's question is a very good one. My wife, Neve, who's Irish, and I always find everybody very polite in Ireland. And I was talking about this because she has just been in Ireland because of relative and Galway's dying. And she came back with exactly the same observations, which is how strikingly sort of polite people were. And therefore, how techy and irritable and stressed Americans, by contrast, appear to be. Now, I've lived here for 15 years. And there's no doubt to me in that time that this isn't become a place with a shorter fuse. People are sort of quicker to anger and little public disputes are just more commonly visible. And so I would agree with the premise of the question. The question is why, I guess, America has become a less polite place, a less civil place. And I think it sort of, I think it keys into what we were discussing at the beginning with the culture wars. You know, one measure of how American society has changed. I think politics is too small a word. It's society that has changed. Is this really sharply declining trust in everything, whether it be science, whether it be politics, whether it be media, whether it be academic institutions, public institutions in general, even less trusted than they were five years ago. And the sort of curve has been going downwards. I've been saying this for years, but you know, the glue of autocracies is fear. For democracy, the glue is trust. Democracy presupposes some goodwill on the part of people who disagree with each other. But at least you all have a similar understanding of the rules of the game. And okay, you won this election, but you know, I disagree with you, but I trust you're not going to change the rules so that I'm not going to have an equal shot at winning the next election. That's gone. We are now in six weeks away from the first presidential election in modern, there's been a taking place in the era of polling, in which most people, most Democrats and most Republicans think that if the other side wins, it will be because of fraud. And the reason why they are saying this is because they think that, for example, if you're a Democrat and Trump wins, there will not be a free and fair election in 2024. That he will so have changed the rules of the game or just abandoned the rules of the game, that the whole idea of there being a playing field will have changed. If there is one, it'll be tilting, it'll be, it'll be sloping heavily away from Democrats. And Republicans have the same fear. In my view, Republicans have much less grounds to fear Joe Biden than Democrats do to fear Donald Trump. But the fact is, the plain fact is, the perception is that the people on the other side are your enemy. They're not your opponent. They're not your adversary in politics. They are your enemy in society. And that's, you mentioned that I've had some not very cheerful columns recently. I would love to be writing more conventional stuff about the election. This is their tax proposal. That's their regulatory proposal. That's what elections, for the most part, been about. This isn't that kind of election. It's a long way from what Louise asked about civility. But I think it's all to do with that. Let's get into the nuts and bolts of the politics now. Peter McClune, who is a board member of the Institute, asks about your views on Joe Biden's running mate. Will she make a difference? And a related question, again, the appointment of the Supreme Court vacancy that has just become apparent with the death of one of the justices. Will that be an election issue? And many, many people have put that question. Actually, that's kind of quite a bit in the question. So I'll group all those questions around the Supreme Court and that issue together. Well, in terms of Kamala Harris, I think she was a fairly smart choice on the part of Biden. You know, she's tough. She doesn't need training wheels. She's been in the Senate. She's been Attorney General of California. She knows how to stand her corner. And she'll probably be a pretty formidable debating opponent for Mike Pence when the vice presidential debate occurs. The bigger question, I think, is the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, I was thinking the other day about what the October surprise would be for this election, whether it's some vaccine that Trump rolls out or a clash with the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea. And as I was thinking of what it might be, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. And I realized this is the October surprise. This, perhaps more than anything, her passing is a lightning rod for the culture wars. It forces the idea that this is a visceral culture war election. I think that in the next few days, President Trump will nominate possibly as early as today, nominate a replacement. My guess is it will be either Amy Coney Barrett or Barbara Nagoa, both of whom are very conservative justices on the federal appeals courts, both of whom would make it very clear that they are in support of overturning Roe v. Wade. So, we would be getting down to the most motivating issue there for conservative evangelical and Catholic right, which is ending a federal abortion right. And we would be breaking all precedent by having this pushed through in the six weeks before the election. If Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, wanted to confirm a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court, but before the election, he could, assuming he had his party with him. So, it might well boil down to, you know, can you peel away for, well, it would boil down to, can you peel away for Republican senators to uphold the rules of the game and say, look, you know, this isn't fair. We should wait until the American people have spoken and decided who their new president is. If it is Trump, then we can confirm her most likely after polling day in the lame duck session. If it isn't Trump, then we should wait until January the 20th. That is something I expect Mitt Romney will say. And I think Susan Collins of Maine has said that. Lisa Mikowski, you need one more. And we don't know whether that will happen. The pressure on Republicans to vote for the nominee is going to be acute. The liberal backlash, should it happen, will, I think, be equally acute. There will then be, it will then be extremely hard for Biden to resist the factions that are arguing. In that case, the moment we get in power, we should expand the size of the Supreme Court from nine to 13. And we will just nominate and confirm four liberal justices within the first week. And I think it would be, it would be, I hate to use a cliche, but it would be a Rubicon. America would be crossing at that point. There's nothing in the Constitution that says how large the Supreme Court should be. It doesn't have to be nine. It's been as small as five over American history. It's been as large as 10. The only time that the president tried to change this was Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, known notoriously as the court packing incident, where he tried to pack the court because the court kept striking down aspects of the new deal. And he tried to pack the court and it blew up in his face. I think in these circumstances, if Trump and McConnell managed to confirm somebody like Amy Coney Barrett, it would be pretty hard for Biden to resist those forces saying we've just got to expand the size of the court. It's in our power. This is about power. We are students at the feet of Republicans. They know how power works. We need to learn from them. Bill Emmett, amongst other things, former editor of The Economist and now a resident in Ireland, asks, how weak a candidate do you think Joe Biden is? This looks like his election to lose. How might he lose it? Hi, Bill. Nice to hear from you. I think this is Biden's election to lose. The difference between 2020 and 2016 is not just that Biden has a higher poll lead. His average is about a percentage point lead over Trump. Hillary's was, I think, 4.6 percent average over the previous six months. So it's a much larger poll lead, but also that pollsters are wiser to swing state polling, where we got let down in 2016 was not the national poll. Hillary did win by a couple of percentage points, the popular vote in 2016, which was within the margin of error. Where the polls got it wrong was in the Midwest and swing states that Trump won, where she was shown to be ahead, namely, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And I think that those, the polling groups have made big adjustments to how they measure those votes and those minute sort of shifts that they missed in 2016. Second, there isn't a Jill Stein to split the vote on the left. There's been some moves to get Kanye West on the ballot, but it's been too haphazard and too late. And the guy is so nuts, you know, they don't know what he's kind of doing next. So he's not the sort of stalking horse type that Republicans might have hoped. And third, Trump's been in office for four years. This is no longer a gamble. This is no longer, well, look, everybody else is corrupt and we know them and we, the familiarity of contempt that people felt for Hillary Clinton, you know, and that Trump was new and could therefore try and change the system and you could justify a gamble on them, a flatter on them. That's no longer the case because he's been in office for four years and we're going to, by polling day, be up to about a quarter of a million dead in the coronavirus pandemic, many of whom need not have died if proper federal guidelines and social distancing policies have been pursued. So that's the fourth and final difference with 2016. People over 65 are now supporting Biden. He's got a lead amongst voters over 65. I wouldn't have expected that and that you can put down pretty much entirely to Trump's handling of the pandemic. So I do think that Biden, the odds are Biden will win. My concern is about the free-ness and fairness around voting and particularly around men in balancing and how easy that's going to be and whether you're going to have enough volunteers to count them and how long it takes to count them. People, you know, are used to thinking of polling day, but this is going to be polling week. It might even be polling month. It takes a long time to count ballots and if you've got a lot of lawyers, county by county, disputing signatures, 2000 Florida style, this could turn into a very prolonged multiple legal drama. That would be my concern and just as an addendum to that, most of the people who are planning to vote by mail are Democrats. Most of the people who are planning to vote in person are Republicans for predictable reasons and they take the coronavirus less seriously and Democrats take it extremely seriously, maybe too seriously and therefore you're going to have the in-person polling numbers coming out instantly on polling day in the evening, showing Trump ahead. And this is what sephologists call a red mirage, showing that Trump is winning. And Trump and Bill Barr, the Attorney General, saying, this is the election, stop the count. We've won. Mail-in ballots are fraudulent. I've been telling you all year they're fraudulent. And in those circumstances, you're going to have to pray that there are more cool heads across the spectrum than hot heads because it could get very hairy. Ethan McDermott is following up on that. She compliments you in your talk so far and asks, are the political institutions and constitution likely to be sufficiently robust to ensure that the incumbent leaves office if he's defeated? It's a very good question. I mean, Joe Biden, perhaps ill-advisedly in an interview or two a few weeks ago, was asked what he would do if Trump refused to leave office having lost the election. And Biden said that he had no doubt the military would escort him out. That was ill-advised because the military are not supposed to get involved in politics, and that's been upheld for 230 years or so. In practice, it would be somebody like the US Marshals or the Capitol Hill Police. I guess, though, the norms are as good as the people upholding them. And we're not in normal times, and norms don't seem to matter so much anymore. If you think of the 2000 election, Al Gore could have disputed the Supreme Court ruling, which halted the recount in Florida. Most of the projections showed him winning the recount, but the Supreme Court voted five to four to halt it. Al Gore could have disputed that, but he didn't. He said, fair enough, these are the rules in the game. I wish George W. Bush all the best as president. That wouldn't be possible today. In the event that we have a Florida-style situation, and you have, let's say, a Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett just confirmed, there is no way the left would permit Biden to say, I'm going to just abandon your express wishes of the majority because he will win the popular vote and just let Trump carry on. Because that trust that the other guy will keep the rules of the game fair for you for the next bite at the apple of the next election, totally gone. And I would argue justifiably gone. I wouldn't trust Trump further than I could throw him. Economist, former trade unionist Paul Sweeney talks or asks about the possibility of major civil unrest. How likely do you see that breakdown of trust that you mentioned over the next few years, whether it's to do with the election or not? Do you see civil unrest becoming a more common thing in the United States? I think more specifically around the election, yes. So I've been involved in a group, a bipartisan group that called the Transition Integrity Project, which has been doing war games, essentially, around different election scenarios. And one of the ones I did was where Biden wins 52 to 47, gets six, seven million more votes in a low turnout election in which Trump somehow manages to win the electoral college. And the pressure on Biden to concede is resisted. He's just not allowed to concede, basically, because of what's at stake. And there are massive demonstrations. And Trump uses this in this scenario to send in the various parliamentary groups from the Department of Homeland Security that you saw cropping up in Portland and elsewhere over the summer, to then create the sense that Trump is the candidate of stability and continuity against these anarchic forces on the ground. We've seen in the last few months a lot more liberals buying guns. There are Second Amendment liberals too nowadays. And it wouldn't take more than a couple of incidents for Trump to justify federalizing the National Guard, having the insurrection act invoked, in which case you could be getting into very dangerous, very, very dangerous territory. I'm not predicting this is going to happen. And scenarios like this, which had pretty impressive players in it, not me, but people from senior echelons of the law and American politics, scenarios like this are about seeing what's plausible. And I don't find that one particularly implausible, precisely because of what we've been talking about in the last 45 minutes, the breakdown of civility, of trust, the assumption of the worst about your opponents. It's feeling more toxic than I've ever felt it. And that, of course, bespeaks of great risks in the years ahead in terms of maintaining civil order. You mentioned earlier that one of the differences between now and the 60s was that the extremism was on the left in the 1960s. There are clearly some extremist groups on the left this time and Tief, et cetera. How big, how powerful, how well armed, how widely supported are those extreme left groups? So the Department of Homeland Security has been doing studies on this, and I don't know if you might have seen that the White House got them to change the conclusions of their study and dilute some of the main findings. But it's very clear that the groups, if you look at groups that are armed, massively stronger on the right than the left. But on the left, you're getting a growth of really hardline groups as well. From a much lower base, it is growing. And you have loosely affiliated organizations like Antifa. They don't have the same hierarchy and structure and membership. You can't really identify them in the state. They're much more amorphous. There are militant wings to Black Lives Matter that are perhaps easier to identify. But there's no doubt they're growing. There is a mini arms race going on amongst paramilitaries in America, which a normal administration and state governments could completely contain. This doesn't have to be a threat to the Republic. But if you're looking at a breakdown of norms in a post-election scenario, then things could get pretty combustible because you've got, I think we estimate that the CSIS had was that there were 30,000 armed militia on the right. They didn't have a number for the left, but I imagine it's thousands. That's enough people with guns to cause a lot of problems. Okay. I'd love to. Apologies to Peter Gunning, who asked a great question about the prospects of American public education and whether there's a connection to that and anti-science, anti-facts. I'm not going to ask you that, Ed, because we really need to move to the international relations dimension to this, given how little time we have left. Packhawk's a former president of the European Parliament. Post-war multilateralism has been laboring under increasing strain. What future for multilateralism after the US elections? I guess that depends. There are two answers to that, a Biden administration, a Trump administration. Well, great question. Look, I think if Trump is re-elected, I think that the US will pull out of the WTO. I think NATO will be very questionable. I think you'll see a continuation of what you've seen in the last four years, which is America walking away from international institutions and China filling the vacuum to some degree by either taking over existing ones or creating ones of its own. I don't think the Trump scenario would be that surprising. It would be more of the same, but probably accelerated. Biden is still, at heart, a status quo anti-person. He shifted a bit beyond his initial contention that Trump is an aberration. I think he now sees Trump as a symptom of a more deep-seated problems, but by and large, on the foreign policy side, I think he sees Trump as an aberration who can be corrected. It's pretty clear from what Biden has said that America would rejoin almost everything that Trump has pulled America out of, barring the TPP. Of course, the TPP was America's creation, but politics forbids Biden from even mentioning the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in a favorable light. The people around Biden are experienced, winnowed public servants for the most part. People like Nick Burns, Bill Burns, Tom Donilon, Kurt Campbell, Susan Rice having been pipped to the post as vice presidential candidate would probably be Secretary of State, in my view. Michelle Flournoy, probably Pentagon, Tony Blinken, probably National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, probably Deputy National Security Advisor, possibly Deputy of State, Secretary of State, Tom Donilon. I mean, there are a lot of familiar, fairly trustworthy names who aren't going to reinvent the rulebook here, but they are going to be very competent in how they administer the rulebook. I don't think Biden in the early months, if he wins, of his administration would need to do very much to reanimate America's partners across the Atlantic, and indeed in Asia. He would just need to swear his oath of office and he'd get a standing ovation. I think there would be a great deal of relief amongst America's allies, probably not so true in Hungary or Poland or some of the allies that have tilted more towards Trump. And you might have some ambivalence in China, which has an ongoing debate about whether Trump is good for them or not. It's actually quite unclear who China wants to win this election. Definitely it would be a bad day for Putin if Biden becomes president, but I think that he will inherit a world that's different to the one he left off. And so simply resuming business as normal isn't enough. You have to imagine and reimagine some of these institutions and America's place in the world. And so that debate is happening in democratic foreign policy circles, and there are different generations. A lot of the people I've mentioned are older generation, but there are younger ones, led perhaps by Jake Sullivan, who are a little bit more prepared to push the envelope on what America should be and how it should reimagine its foreign policy. And I suspect that would be a very important cleavage in a Biden administration. I do get to ask a Peter Gunning question. He wonders if there are fundamental aspects of the Europe-U.S. relationship that have changed. Now, I think you partially answered that question already, but on issues and on moving towards the trade thing as we move towards the conclusion of particular concern, the United States is on its biggest trading partner. I know many people think it's Britain or some of the continental countries, but it's actually the United States. So are there fundamental things that have changed? As you say, Biden would inherit something that is different. What are those fundamental changes? And particularly on trade policy under a Biden administration, do you think America will become much more protectionist, a little more protectionist? Any thoughts on those issues? The direction is on trade. It's sort of Trumpianism with a human face, and a more predictable sort of signaling system. So I don't think America is going to go back to saying, okay, let's resume T-Tip discussions. Just find that hard to believe. I think there will be a lot of focus on getting a common Western position on the Internet in the context of how much further along China is than it was in 2016. So I think there will be that. I think there will be very little chance of a U.K.-U.S. trade deal, even if the U.K. starts behaving well again on the Northern Ireland protocol. I just don't think it's going to be high up on a Biden administration's list. And I think we've spoken about this before, but the key players there are Nancy Pelosi and Richie Neal, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. They're not in favor of rewarding Brexit Britain with a trade deal. So Biden is more protectionist, not maybe at heart, but he's a poll's poll. He knows which way the winds are blowing. And he's not going to be pushing for big deals unless he can show massive reshoring potential from those deals of American manufacturing. Personally, I think none of this makes much sense. You don't reshor jobs in manufacturing. You just reshor production. And America has more manufacturing than it's ever had. It's just it doesn't create jobs. And the problem is the lack of jobs, not the lack of manufacturing. So until America understands that basic distinction and allows its politics to think more rationally about these things, you know, that unfortunately is going to continue to distort the whole debate about trade. I don't think Biden's going to be moving in a direction that Europe particularly wants America to move, but it's not going to be in a dramatic way. And it's going to be far more predictable and far more easy to be an interlocutor with a President Biden than with a President Trump. Just a follow up. Do you think Trump would pull out of the WTO? Is that a he mentioned that even in the last election campaign, obviously, there's been the US position on the dispute arbitration system with the WTO has effectively stopped it. But do you think the US could pull out of the WTO all together under a second Trump administration? I think it would do so within the first year. I mean, there's been a couple of points where Trump had wanted to pull out of the WTO and light highs, though his trade rep sensitive is in favor of that. You know, not to mention people like Robert Navarro, his trade advisor in the National Security Council. And what would Biden do on WTO? I think Biden would have to talk about reforming it. He's been very light on trade policy in his campaign. He's been very light on trade policy and he's been very light on China policy and the two are sort of hard to separate nowadays. So if you would privately ask all of these people, I just mentioned, I know all these people, you know, I've been in 15 years, they've been around, I've been around. All of them would be totally on board with America rejoining the TPP as the best way to handle China as it originally was. But they understand that the politics of this is very difficult. So you'd have to do to the TPP what Trump did with NAFTA. You would have to have lots of dumb and strong about renegotiating it and have a TPP 2.0. And, you know, then the WTO, you know, maybe it wouldn't really matter at that point, you could just sort of revive it and fulfill its quota on its appeals body, on its appellate body, and that wouldn't matter so much. But you're going to have to, if you want to get back to the status quo, Auntie, you're going to have to make a great show about pretending not to. Two questions from two comments. Sonya Highland asks, could Trump pull out of NATO? And Connor Fagan asks, what are the prospects of Biden rejoining the Iran nuclear deal? On the latter, the Iran nuclear deal, I think Biden wants to rejoin it. As you know, all the other original signatories, China, Russia, Germany, UK, France, have stayed in it. But Iran, because of America's withdrawal, has breached some of the limits on the Iranian enrichment, etc., that it agreed to in the 2015 deal. So Biden's simply coming in and saying, now that it's breached these limits, we should rejoin. Again, he's going to have to, he's going to have to somehow renegotiate this and get Iran to agree to new restrictions. So it's not simply saying, well, we left the club, now we're rejoining it. The politics won't permit that. Yes, Trump wants to leave NATO. He's been cancelled against it. He's had that instinct all along. I think a Trump who twice wins against conventional wisdom, when people expected him to lose, it's very hard to overestimate what that would do to his psychology, that he can do anything he wants. To do this twice, I've long seen this election as a Trump election as three times as consequential as him getting elected in the first place. Getting elected in the first place, you can see as an aberration, an accident, a quirk, a freak of electoral nature. Twice would mean America really wants him, that America is really serious about this new phase. But in terms of the psychology of Trump, there would be nobody who could dissuade him from doing what he wants instinctively. He would be the genius. I think that is a good note to end it on, Ed. We're just coming to the end of our time. I apologize to people, the questions that I couldn't get in the hour is over. So thanks for everyone for tuning in. We've covered an awful lot of ground. Thanks so much, Ed, for joining us again. It's been a real pleasure and a real tour de force, so we greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dan. A real delight, anytime.