Episode 2246: Jonathan Rauch on the catastrophic ordinariness of contemporary America

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap, November 5 was a moral catastrophe for the future of American democracy. But, on the other, slapping on his Brookings analyst’s cap, Rauch celebrates November 5 as an ordinary election. I suspect the double capped Rauch is onto a singular thing here. There is a feeling of catastrophic ordinariness about America right now. It’s that moment before a crash when everything slows down and you know something dramatic is about to happen. Enjoy the (horror) show, Rauch seems to be saying. America is about to become very unordinary.

Transcript:

“When I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.” -Jonathan Rauch

AK: Hello, everybody. I'm just back from a little bit of an East Coast jaunt. I drove around rural Virginia a couple of days ago, and I saw this sign, for people who are just listening, there's a "Trump/Vance 2024" flag, and then underneath someone has put "winner." And that is clear. There's no doubt the Trump and Vance in 2024 are the clear winners in every sense. From the point of view of liberals, it's very concerning. Francis Fukuyama, who might be described as the pope of American liberalism, believes that the Trump win marks a decisive rejection of liberalism. So it's a historic change. And my guest today on the show, an old friend of of show, Jonathan Rauch, I think agrees. He's described the November election as "Tuesday's moral catastrophe." In spite of that moral catastrophe, John Rauch is still around. Just back from the south of France. It's a hard place to go, John. What do you mean by a moral catastrophe? I mean, those are strong words.

JONATHAN RAUCH: I mean in a specific sense. We don't write our own headlines, of course. And that one is a little blunt. What I meant by that is that for the last eight years, people like me, including me, have done everything in our power to persuade the American electorate that Donald Trump was an unacceptable candidate from the point of view of morality and character and basic decency and observation of the fundamental norms on which our country and constitution rely. And this election, 2024, was a complete, I think, repudiation of that view. It was an ordinary election. The good news is that it was an ordinary election. We did—

AK: And you wrote a piece for Brookings. You're a fellow of Brookings—

JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, that's right.

AK: —On this ordinary election. So on the one hand, it was ordinary. On the other hand, it was extraordinary. It was a moral catastrophe.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it was. Yeah, that's right. The good news is that it was an ordinary election. It was a rerun of 2016. It was an anti-incumbent election. It was close. It was undisputed. We've seen all that before. The bad news, for someone like me who's been saying for eight years is this this guy is not someone who should be anywhere near the White House, is that it was an ordinary election. The voters looked at everything that he's done and everything that people like me said. And they shrugged and they said, well, you know what? You're either wrong or we're not interested. They treated him as you would another candidate. And so from that point of view, this is a, I think, a decisive rejection of what folks like me have been saying. And we have to change.

AK: John, I know you don't have any kids. I've got kids. And I think rule number one of parenting—and I'm certainly not the person to lecture anyone on good or bad, or certainly good parenting—rule number one of parenting always seemed to me, was if you tell a kid enough times that they can't do something, in the end, they will. And I don't mean to trivialize your argument, but what you just said to me sounded like—and correct me if I'm wrong, that the John Rauchs of the world, fellows at Brookings, authors of bestselling books like Constitution of Knowledge, for eight years, you warn the American people that the guy on the ballot, Donald Trump, was a bad deal, that he was a bad man, that he was unethical, all the rest of it. For eight years, you told them, you made it clear, and they have disobeyed you. And this is a crisis. In terms of that narrative, were you, you collectively I mean, you can't speak on behalf of your Brookings class, but weren’t you are asking for trouble by making it so clear that you disapproved of this particular candidate?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it certainly appears that way today, doesn't it? On the other hand, one cannot deny what you said. Clearly, all the things that people like me have have said, and many, many other people, the editorial boards of many newspapers, and Frank Fukuyama, a brilliant man and wonderful scholar. They've been rejected, and so they've just clearly failed. So you're undoubtedly right. The question is, should we have just shut up this whole time? Should we not have pointed out, for example, that this is someone who led an effort to overthrow the United States government, that this is someone who lied by actual account, average of 20 times a day while he was in office? You can't really not point these things out in a liberal democracy, can you? So when I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.

AK: Are you saying then in a sense that it's a moral catastrophe not for America, but to quote you, for people like John Rauch, that your ideas, that you grew up with it you clearly believe in, you're one of the upholders ethically, philosophically of liberal ideals. Is this a catastrophe for yourself?

JONATHAN RAUCH: That is exactly what I'm saying. You just said it better.

AK: Well, you said it well, John, a moral catastrophe for yourself. And does that suggest that, really, you're beginning to question your own ideas, that more than half of America, maybe 51, 52 percent of the people who voted suggested that you were wrong?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I'm not a populist, and in fact, as an atheistic homosexual Jew, I'm very used to being part of an unpopular minority and thinking that I was right regardless. And I don't think I can or want to change fundamentally in my view. For example, the founders, the U.S. Constitution, the benefits of small liberalism. I don't mean left wing progressivism. I'm center right myself, but I mean the ideals of the American founding and the Enlightenment. I still think that there's actually—Fukuyama was right in what he said in the early 90s. There's no real alternative to those things if what you want is peace, prosperity, freedom, and knowledge. But where I think I have to go back to square one is trying to figure out how to make that case. People like me, you know, I assumed that we were the majority, that we spoke for mainstream America, and that that Trump was a fringe candidate who had somehow managed to commandeer the commanding heights of politics. And I think someone like you is quicker to understand, no, that it's actually the other way around. A large number of the people, and now clearly a majority of the people, are on his side. And that means that we, people like me, again, liberals of the world need to recalibrate and understand we're no longer the mainstream. We're now the dissident faction. It's a very different world than we thought we lived in.

AK: Although, in a way, it's a return to some. And you and I spent some time together this summer at the Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference. It was actually put on, I think, by the same people who published your "Tuesday’s Moral Catastrophe," the UnPopulist. But I wonder, in your piece, you talk about something called "the moral minority." I mean, isn't that the foundations of classical liberalism? Isn't that what John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most influential of all 19th century liberals, focused in on liberalism? What's wrong with being in the moral minority? Is there something...insecure about wanting to be in the moral majority, John?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, again, Andrew, I think you're exactly right. And the problem is that I forgot that. We had such—liberals, you know, again, I always use the word liberal in this conversation. I hope you're—

AK: Yeah, with a small L. We're not talking about left-wing democrats.

JONATHAN RAUCH: With a small L. Madison and Jefferson and Burke and Locke and Tocqueville and all of that. The founding ideas of liberal democracy. So we had an easy ride for many years. We assumed that we were the good guys. We were certainly right when the opponents were of fascism and communism. And then in the 90s it appeared that the world had simply come around, and that America was on a straight path to to just preserving this model forever. And what we've seen now is that that's not true. What we've seen is a lot of people feel left behind. Now, we knew a lot of people were being left behind. And at the think tank where I work, Brookings, for decades now, we have been hatching ideas every day about how to help those people, you know, retraining, trade adjustment assessment, apprenticeship programs, better forms of welfare. It's all we do all day, is try to help those who are left behind. Nonetheless, it's just as you say, I think we got complacent. I think now it's now obvious we are complacent. What else can you say after an election like this?

AK: And yet you talk about this moral minority. Earlier you defined yourself as an atheist, a homosexual, a Jew—probably a secular Jew. And when I think of John Rauch, I would think is much more comfortable in a—I mean, he is a minority guy. I mean, that's your mentality. So what's changed? So, your political party—with a small P—your liberals, they're in the minority. So what?

JONATHAN RAUCH: So I thought that...I was certainly in a minority in my lack of belief in God, and in being a member of a minority religion, and especially growing up gay in a world where that made you a pariah. But all of those things we saw remarkable progress. In the world I grew up in, of course, homosexuality was illegal. You couldn't serve in the military. Marriage was a ridiculous idea. Atheists were the most unpopular people in the country. Polls found that, you know, Gallup results would show that atheists were unelectable to public office. And we'd just come out of the shadow of the Holocaust. And my father, who is, we're talking about the 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to Phoenix because as a Jew, he couldn't get a job on the East Coast, because he wasn't in the top half of his law school class. And we saw immense improvements—

AK: I'm sorry to jump in here, John, and I'm not trivializing this, but if he had been in the top half, would he have got a job as a Jew?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, what he told me is that because he wasn't in the top half, he couldn't. And he had to move to Phoenix to get a job. So more than that, I can't tell you, but—

AK: But that's going back to parenting. It was probably smart. You'd never be even close to being the bottom half of anything.

JONATHAN RAUCH: But, you know, when he moved to Phoenix in the 50s, and when I grew up in the 60s, Jews could not join the Phoenix Country Club. So the story that I heard is the story of liberalism—again, small L-liberalism—coming through for people like me. And I thought, that's the nature of our country, where we are fundamentally, at the end of the day—we may make wrong decisions in the short term—but we are about advancing rights according to liberal doctrine. And so I now feel an outsider in the one category where I always felt an insider.

AK: I think you probably seek—you would never acknowledge it publicly—but I don't think that unhappy about it.

JONATHAN RAUCH: About which?

AK: About being an outsider.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, that's interesting. I am unhappy about the decision that my country has taken in a direction that I think is very, very bad for all kinds of reasons, which we can discuss. I am very unhappy that so many people would support a person whose candidacy and character I think are indefensible. I am certainly unhappy about that. And I'm unhappy about thinking that my country is a different kind of place than I thought. All of those things make me very unhappy. The broader way in which you're maybe right, and I've have never had to think about it quite this way, is: it was unhealthy for liberals to become complacent, to become insiders, to not listen, to not notice. And it may be good for us—in fact, it may be necessary for us to start from scratch, which is kind of where I think we are.

AK: I wonder, John, whether one of the problems—and I'm as much of a liberal as you, although I'm naturally I'm always uncomfortable if I'm in the majority, by definition, if I'm in the majority, then I'll change my mind to go into the minority—I wonder whether one of the problems—Fukuyama's an old friend of yours, certainly the high priest, the pope of American liberalism. Of course, much misunderstood in terms of his end-of-history narrative. But he did have a—and you talked about it earlier—a kind of teleology, and he perhaps still does, the idea of history progressing towards something better. It's Martin Luther King's moral arc of the universe. Might that be one of the problems with American liberalism? That we've accepted this Fukuyama/MLK-style teleological narrative, that the world is always becoming a better place?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I don't know that I'd put the Fukuyama thesis quite that way. It wasn't that the world's always becoming a better place, but it was a view of the moral directionality of liberalism, that is, over time, if you have liberal forms of government and economics and epistemology—that is, science, the way you go about finding knowledge—that you will over time tend to increase peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge. So they were saying that, and I still think that's true, Andrew. I still think that the people proposing various alternatives to liberalism, Christian nationalism, or various forms of state enterprise, or Chinese-style communism, or postmodernism or wokeism. I think those are bad ideas, and I think they won't work. I think they'll make people less free and less knowledgeable, and there will be more conflict. And so I think Frank Fukuyama was fundamentally actually right. There's really only one system in the 200,000 years of the human species which has surmounted our tribal instincts and allowed us to knit together into a global community, which has over time, increased prosperity, knowledge, diminished war and poverty. So I don't challenge that premise. Where I think you're right, and what I think we were too complacent about, is we kind of assumed that that would be on autopilot and that the people who are left behind, for example, or who are unhappy with demographic change, or the way the country was changing, that they could just be kind of dismissed, you know, that they would be happy because GDP is is growing. And that turns out, of course, to be wrong.

AK:  You talk about—I don't remember if you said 20,000 or 2000 years—but is the one system over—

JONATHAN RAUCH: Two hundred thousand.

AK: A hundred, wow, it's even more, 100,000. I'll use that as the title for the interview, John. One system over 100,000 years that—

JONATHAN RAUCH: Two hundred thousand.

AK: Two hundred? We'll put it up.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Three hundred, depending when you date the—

AK: Yeah, maybe a million. Well, certainly a lot of years since we've overcome tribalism. But some people might respond—including some people who think of themselves as liberals. Yascha Mounk comes to mind—that the idea of overcoming tribalism is itself a kind of unrealistic, almost utopian, ideology, that we are, by definition, tribal. In fact, we've had a number of shows on the value of tribalism. There's a guy at Columbia whose book in defense of corporate and social tribalism is actually shortlisted for the F.T. Book of the Year. So are you suggesting that—in your view, at least, you use this word tribalism, it's your word, Jon, rather than mine—are you suggesting that it's fundamentally incompatible with liberalism, that for a liberal system to work, we can't think tribally? In racial, cultural, I don't know, in every sense, linguistic terms?

JONATHAN RAUCH: No, I'm saying, in a way, the opposite. The great liberal theorists going back to John Locke, but especially my favorite of them, my hero, James Madison, understood that what could be called tribalism, or what can also be called partizanship of a certain type, and what Madison called faction, that this is a fundamental driver of the human species, and that you're not going to make it go away, and that the flaw of most of these other systems, you know, monarchy and autocracy and theocracy, is that they tried to stamp out the identities of individuals and of groups and tribes and simply impose one on everybody. You know, we're all now going to be the tribe of Catholics, for example. And a certain type of Catholic. You're going to stamp out all the heresies. Liberalism's innovation is to say, no. That stamping out human nature—we will always be tribal and partizan and factional. So you want to build a society where people in their factions and in their tribes can nonetheless get along through negotiation and compromise and persuasion. And then you set up mechanisms and constitutions that try to get them to do that. And then you teach norms that get them to support those things. And that's all extremely difficult. But the core of liberalism is understanding that the factions are always there, and managing them is always hard. And guess what? The things that we thought were working haven't been working so well.

AK:  Yeah. So John, you're collapsing tribalism and Madison's notion of faction.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Am I wrong?

AK: Well, I've never thought of them quite in the same way. I mean, people are...didn't Madison mean by faction people's self-interest? So, business owners or exporters or importers or people whose interests happened to coincide? That's what faction is. Tribalism is something that we...we tend to be born in to tribes. And isn't that the problem that liberals have with tribalism? That it can't be overcome? I mean, you know, the classic one is, is race. You're born white or black. You can't choose what you're born and how you can't repaint yourself. So there is a difference between, I mean, in my sense, between tribalism and faction.

JONATHAN RAUCH: I would I would dispute that actually. I think Madison—my interpretation of Madison is, right? Which is that these are all just forms of groupieness. You know, you've seen these experiments. There are tons of them. But you take students and you divide them randomly into two groups and you put one of them in red jerseys and the other in green jerseys and you tell them they're different groups. And then you put them through experiments like how altruistic they are, and they almost instantly bond into groups based on entirely random categories with people they've never known before. And so you can be born into one of those things. Of course, I actually am not convinced race is something you're born into. I think it's socially constructed to a large extent. But setting that aside, I think all of these things just come down to the natural tendency of humans to form groups and to form loyalties in those groups and then have insiders and outsiders—partizanship, which used to be pretty fungible, we saw bipartisanship all the time, has now become tribal, just in the sense that people put their identities into it. They define it as an identity. And, you know, the color jersey you wear can define your identity, and certainly your identity as a farmer can define it. So however you call it, you know, I think we're talking about the same basic phenomenon, which is what do you do about our tendency to groupieness and to—I guess I hate this term, but I'll use it—"othering," saying, the world is people like us, and people like them, and we're people like us, and we're against people like them.

AK: John, Tuesday's moral catastrophe—and it was a couple of Tuesdays ago—is it a unique catastrophe? And there was an interesting piece in this weekend's Financial Times by Mark Mazower, excellent Columbia University historian, and why he said, he was suggesting that Trump's victory will change America. That goes without saying. Europe is going to respond very differently. He doesn't believe it's fascist, but he said something very interesting in the piece. He said, the U.S. is the only nation in the world currently governed by a document drawn up in the age of the Enlightenment. Of course, perhaps the most influential figure in that is your hero, Madison. Does this make what's happening in America, this rejection, in your eyes, at least, of liberalism so particularly important? Is it the final nail in the coffin of the Enlightenment, John?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it's certainly not the final nail. This is an ongoing story. And for just the reasons we've discussed, I have hope that I and my friends and the people who are with us at the conference that you mentioned in July will be shaken out of our complacency and find ways both to solve, or help solve the kinds of problems that liberalism has, and also find better ways to explain it and its enormous advantages. I can tell you that I think Chinese communism, for example, is is not the solution. I do think it's important to note that what's happening now is not just in America. It's global. We've seen—this year has been, according to the people who look at such things—this year has been a record year for anti-incumbency all around the world. In fact, as far back as—

AK: I mean, as you say in your Brookings piece, a very ordinary election, inflation historically always made it very hard for incumbents to keep their power in an election.

“The question is, should we have just shut up this whole time? Should we not have pointed out, for example, that this is someone who led an effort to overthrow the United States government, that this is someone who lied by actual account, average of 20 times a day while he was in office? You can't really not point these things out in a liberal democracy, can you? So when I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.” -JR

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, that's right. But everywhere you look, Japan, we had a serious upset. Germany's government has collapsed. Macron's government has collapsed. Everywhere you look, you see voters who are unhappy with the status quo and grabbing vehicles to oppose it. And sometimes those vehicles are far right-wing parties in Europe, which have been fringe or nonexistent until now. And America is part of that trend. And one of the things that folks like me need to try to figure out is why are people so damn unhappy?

AK: Well, you know that, you don't need...I mean, you just need to look at the inflation numbers, the poverty numbers, the inequality numbers, the addiction numbers, the death of despair numbers. That's not hard for a guy like you to understand, is it, John?

JONATHAN RAUCH: A lot of those numbers are better. A lot of the—

AK: But that does still make it...I mean, they haven't gone away.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well sure, there are always problems, I'm not denying, and I'm not saying something silly. But the American economy was objectively much better than people gave it credit for. People were telling pollsters that the United States economy today is as bad as it was in the Great Depression of the 1930s. And I can tell you that's just not the case. And...increasingly people attribute what's happening not just to objective factors like economic growth and inflation, though of course those are there, I wouldn't deny it, but to anomie, to things like loneliness, to the lack of connection. David Brooks has a very big article in The Atlantic on the many ways—you alluded to some of them—that people are finding their lives coming up short and a lot of them have to do with intangible factors like do they have friends, do they feel secure if they're in trouble? Do they have someone to call? Do they feel that they live in an environment which is safe? And those things...we at Brookings pay attention to the numbers, right? These intangibles are harder to cope.

AK: I wonder, it'd be really interesting, I don't know if everyone's done the research on this, John, whether your point about the age of anxiety and loneliness, David Brooks has written about it, all sorts of other people, it's one of the dominant intellectual strains of our age. But I wonder whether anyone's done any research of whether...a sense of loneliness is more dominant in the minds of Harris voters versus Trump voters. My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the Trump voter is less likely to be lonely than the Harris voter, because they're less urban, less bound up in all the enemy of post-post digital capitalism.

JONATHAN RAUCH: I know those numbers exist. I don't know what they show. A couple related trends, which I do know a little bit, is that indicators go in different directions. Progressives, people on the left with college degrees and all that, who are very progressive, are more neurotic and less happy than conservatives. And that stands to reason, since they seem to spend their days telling themselves that we will never have progress on race and that we live in a terrible and unjust society of settler colonialism. So there's that. On the other hand, we have a scholar at Brookings who studies happiness and hope. Happiness not in the sense of mood, you know, how cheerful I am, but life satisfaction, how good do I think my life is? And the ethnic group in America—the socioeconomic group, I should say—that is least hopeful is working class whites. And it turns out college educated whites are also low on the hope scale. And the most hopeful people in America are African-Americans.

AK: Well they've been—I know this from families—they've been through so much hell historically that whatever they do now doesn't compare with what's happened in the past. Yeah that's a—

JONATHAN RAUCH: Bingo. Yes. That's exactly what Carol thinks. I mean, we don't know we don't have a—

AK: Who is the person at Brookings who does this?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Carol Graham. She terrific. She's studying hope, actually. But that's right. The trajectory for African-Americans is much like my trajectory as a gay American, which is you've seen this remarkable progress. And that gives you hope, the trajectory for whites, especially working-class whites who really are having a bad time economically, they're looking back at a world in which they had more stock.

AK: Yeah, but...I take your point on that, but my point was not on that. It was about loneliness as opposed to unhappiness. But maybe we can get her on the show. I'm guessing John, I'm the last cheerful progressive, am I?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Are you cheerful, Andrew?

AK: I'm very cheerful. I'm sort of...I always think Americans are miserable optimists, and I'm a cheerful pessimist. So whatever happens now makes me more cheerful. When the news is good always makes me nervous and miserable. You've talked, John, and we're going to reverse this, actually, next week you're going to interview me because you're one of the people I most respect, I'm interested in getting your take on what I think. You'll help me figure that out. You keep on mentioning complacency. You and I were at this Liberalism for the 21st Century, and I think I told you at the time, I thought it was very complacent, very elitist. It sort of reflected the problem rather than the solution. One thing that I have to admit, I disagreed with you in your moral catastrophe piece was the idea that Harris, and I'm quoting you here, ran an exemplary campaign. I mean, okay, everybody knows she got thrown in the deep end and all the rest of it. You don't need me to tell you that. But I think it was anything but exemplary. It was complacent. She had no, in my view, at least, no sense of why she wanted to be president. She rested on the Biden assumption that the economy was good and that there was no real reason to fundamentally change that. So what was, in your view, exemplary about the Harris campaign? She didn't manifest any kind of confidence. She wasn't even willing to go on the Joe Rogan Show because apparently some of her staff were uncomfortable with that. What do you admire about the Harris campaign?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, as I think you agree, she was cast into extremely challenging circles.

AK: Yeah, I've said that. I acknowledged that. But—

JONATHAN RAUCH: You acknowledged that. And when I say exemplary, I don't mean against a standard in which she could start from scratch, go through an entire primary campaign, develop policy proposals. And most importantly—and this really is important—not be an incumbent. She was an incumbent. She tried not to sound like she wasn't an incumbent, you know, turn the page and all of that, but the voters are not dumb. And they said, well, you are the sitting vice president of the United States. And they refused to separate her from Joe Biden, whose popularity was extremely low, low 40s, high 30s. That's a massive headwind. And those are conditions she can't change. The conditions that she could change begin with handling Biden extremely well. There were no leaks from the Harris operation trying to nudge Biden out, and that actually helped get him out. Then she was able to corral the delegates she needed in 36 hours. That seemed like a very heavy lift. People—

AK: I think that reflects very poorly, actually, on the Democratic Party, that they were pushed into this.

JONATHAN RAUCH: No, well, they got the delegates. Now, part of that is because the Democrats didn't have time to go through a proper primary process. And people who thought that they could somehow do an abbreviated version of that in three weeks were just on drugs. There was no way that was going to happen. She raised a stupendous amount of money. She had an extremely good team with essentially zero internal money.

AK: The money was worthless. She had no idea that she was spending it. I mean, she raised ridiculous amounts of money that were just wasted.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I mean, I don't know. She'll probably wind up within a percentage point of Trump in the popular vote and the places—

AK: Are you claiming victory, then, a moral victory, John?

JONATHAN RAUCH: No, no, no. I'm saying that the places where she spent money, which are the seven swing states, the evidence that people who study this thing are saying, is that all of those places were much closer than the places that she didn't spend money. And part of that is because she was able to focus resources. But, you know, to continue, she crushed her opponent in a debate. So when I say exemplary, I mean, I think she did as good a job as you can expect someone to do in that situation. She still lost, because the country wanted a change and they understood the status quo.

AK: I mean...she took no risks. She was unwilling. There was no reason...she's not in Biden's pocket. There was no reason why she couldn't have crushed Biden. When she was asked—the famous moment, to me, the whole campaign was finished when, I think it was on one of the morning shows, someone said, "Well, how would you be different from Biden?" And there was this long "um," and then she had no idea. The fact that—she'd clearly been thinking about this for years, I mean, it was obvious what might happen. But she had no idea of how she was different. I mean, what most troubles me about Harris, and this perhaps goes to the complacency of the liberal establishment, and you're not really part of that establishment, although you know it better than I do, is that complacency, their idea that actually things are pretty good, and that Biden did a good job, and the economy was good and it's not Trump, and if you just reminded people that the economy was improving and you're not Donald Trump and you're a small liberal, then you're going to win. To me, it was anything but exemplary.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, we'll agree to disagree, but I will agree with you that that was a terrible answer. It was a bad moment.

AK: But it's more than just a bad answer. The truth is—

JONATHAN RAUCH: Here's where we disagree, which is: like it or not, she's the incumbent. And it is not credible for an incumbent, it just never has been, for a vice president to say, "the administration that just happened wasn't me." Because it was her. So that moment was a bad moment and she could and should have done better. But I think the screw up was that the Biden administration ignored immigration and inflation for too long. And in hindsight, that's pretty clear. But that that was baked in, right? That's the world she inherited. So I guess we could go round and round on that, you know, if they'd had a full primary process and Biden had gotten out and you had had someone who was not in government, like Josh Shapiro, or maybe Gavin Newsom, you know, all these people have their flaws. You know Gavin Newsom a lot better than I do.

AK: And Newsom's been on the show. I think he's a bit too smirk.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, he might be. But then I think he would have had time to develop those things. But I think what we did have is a test in this election. She ran as an avatar of the Biden administration because she was, you just can't run away from that. She's sitting vice president. And she ran into an electorate which said, you know what? We think Biden is a failed president and that makes you a failed vice president. And we don't want to fail another term of that. We want something else. That's Donald Trump. And where people like me fell on our faces is that we tried to tell them, well, Donald Trump is unacceptable. So go with the failed presidency. Go with the failed administration. And they're not willing to do that.

“Liberals of the world need to recalibrate and understand we're no longer the mainstream. We're now the dissident faction. It's a very different world than we thought we lived in.” -JR

AK: Right. And you write about in your excellent piece, "The Moral Catastrophe," you quote along elections determining norms, which is certainly the case in this last election. I mean, briefly, going back to Harris, what about...does the fact that she seemed to be running by committee, she's like an American car or something designed by committee, completely unwilling, I mean, she's the reverse of Trump, completely unwilling to take risks, completely unwilling to do or say anything that might offend anyone or create any kind of controversy. Is that just a problem with Harris and her camp, or is this a problem, John, with small-L liberals in America today, this unwillingness to challenge, to tell the truth? I mean, coming back to Biden, there seems to be, in my view, at least, a kind of conspiracy amongst mainstream media not to tell the truth about Biden over the last 2 or 3 years, that he was clearly...not fit to be president, that he was too old, that he'd lost something that made him barely presidential. And yet the press never focused on this. So why is our—and I'm part of your class—why is our class so unwilling to take risks.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, there's two things there. One is about the coverage of Biden, and that's a separate conversation. And I have a minority view on that.

AK: Do you agree or disagree with me?

JONATHAN RAUCH: I disagree. I think that the reason that the Biden's condition wasn't broadly reported is that the administration hid, it and they clobbered you if you tried to write on it, and when The Wall Street Journal finally was able to get a story in about it April, they could only get one person to go on the record about Biden's condition. And that was former Speaker McCarthy, who is not an unbiased source. Biden held essentially no press conferences. He shut that down. He withheld himself from the press. I think he's Parkinsonian. They have good days and they have bad days. Doesn't mean Parkinson's disease, by the way. There are lots of things that can cause the things you see of him, kind of the slurred speech and the slack-jawed look and the stumbling gait. But he was hiding that. And he was abetted in hiding it by people who should not have done that.

AK: But it's the whole administration. It's all these—

JONATHAN RAUCH: But that's a side question. Your big question—yeah, I shouldn't have gone down that rabbit hole, because who knows? But your big point is, are liberals refusing to take risks and tell the truth? I don't know about liberals because it's a very big group. And my friends at the Cato Institute, for example, who are classical liberal libertarians, say all kinds of things that are very risky, like privatize all the schools. I do think, though, that that's the case about Democrats, and that they should, for example, have separated Biden and Harris, and other people should have separated themselves from the academic left, you know, the genderqueer people and the critical race theory, social justice, critical, everything people, they should have separated themselves from those people and they should have been willing to say that a woman is an adult human female, and that they've been afraid to do that because that part of the coalition can be so noisy. And in fact, when things are this close in the country, when you're having one 50/50 election after another, you're afraid of losing part of your base. But there, yeah, I agree with you. Democrats need to learn a page from Republicans who have been nothing if not risk takers.

“Increasingly people attribute what's happening not just to objective factors like economic growth and inflation, though of course those are there, I wouldn't deny it, but to anomie, to things like loneliness, to the lack of connection.” -JR

AK: That the party then needs its Sister Souljah movement. You've been very generous with your time, John, and we're going to continue this conversation. Still a lot to talk about. Back in. Back in August 2022, a couple of years ago, it seems a long time ago now, you wrote for The Atlantic: Trump's second term would look like this. And you talked about the extinction of American democracy. Where are you? I mean, you're obviously worried this these are difficult times, to put it euphemistically from your point of view. How fearful are you about this second term? I mean, we're speaking after the appointment of certain cabinet ministers, appointments for the attorney general, RFK Junior. I mean, there's a there's a whole episode to talk about here, but...when you look back to August 2022, so a couple of years ago, more than two years ago, when you talked about the Trump second term, are you more or less pessimistic about the fate of American democracy?

JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, you are right that that would be a great opening point for a separate episode, because there's so much to discuss there, and I am so interested in your view of that, which has been very different from mine, and perhaps, I hope, will prove correct. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm about a nine. The things that I said in August of 2022 that they would do, they are doing, and they can do, and we know what they are, because they've either told us what they are or they've actually tried to do them in Trump's first term. And we will see them unfold. And if I'm correct about the sixth out of six of them, the one thing that he did not do in his first term, then that's the end of liberal democracy in America as we've known it. And what that sixth thing is, is the open violation of court orders, making Supreme Court orders, rulings, optional. I fully expect that they will do that. Now, I hope I'm wrong about that. But if that happens, in addition to the other five things that we predicted and that we know they want to do and that they're now setting about doing, yeah, I think we live in a fundamentally different kind of regime. It's not, of course, China, but it's in the direction of Hungary...and yeah, so I'm pretty much hair on fire. I'd like to be wrong, though. I'd like you to be right. And as you know, I give your view great weight. I view you as kind of a canary in the mineshaft of people who said, you know, I'm too hysterical.

AK: I like being called the canary in the mineshaft. Jonathan Rauch, we will continue this conversation. We're going to switch hats. It's going to be my hair on fire the next time around. John's going to come back on the show and talk to me.

JONATHAN RAUCH: You have a lot more hair to set on fire.

AK: Yeah, well, for the moment. But we will continue this conversation. John, It's always an honor and a lot of fun to have you on the show. You are certainly the most the most human of liberals, I would say. Warts and all, you don't deny any aspect of the liberal condition. So it's always an honor to have you on the show, which is, I think, the essence of liberalism, in contrast to some of the utopianism of other ideologies. So we will—

JONATHAN RAUCH: Andrew Keen meets out his compliments with parsimony. So I take that as a as a good one.

AK: Good John, well, honor. And I hope you survive the next week, because I want you back on the show and you're going to interview me. So we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. John Rauch, keep well, keep worrying. We need you to worry. If you worry, then makes it easier for the rest of us. Thank you so much.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award. His books include The Constitution of Knowledge, The Happiness Curve, and Gay Marriage. He lives in northern Virginia.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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