American democracy is breaking in a very predictable way

0:00 I made in that article some very uh definitive predictions about the future.

0:04 At my more more mature self would

0:06 just admit to more uncertainty about everything.

0:09 But I do think that the sort of basic structural question that that piece raises

0:15 can get a little bit underrated these days

0:18 relative to things that are idiosyncratic to Trump.

0:21 I want to be clear on my agenda here.

0:22 So I'm not trying to slam you personally.

0:25 I'm not like Matt, you didn't predict that we would

0:27 elect this total political lunatic who would break the law.

0:30 Yes, yeah, to to invite you on.

0:31 No, no, no.

0:32 I'm just trying to give due credit to the weirdness of history.

0:55 So I am really excited to welcome to the Grey

0:59 Area Friday for the first time Matt Yglesias,

1:01 the co-founder of our esteemed website and now

1:05 current proprietor of the Slow Boring blog.

1:07 I don't know why I'm using such fancy official language for this, but Matt,

1:11 welcome to the show.

1:12 yeah.

1:12 Yeah, I don't know.

1:13 That was weird.

1:13 Get into a lot of a lot of words.

1:16 We are talking about an old essay that you wrote back in early Vox days,

1:21 the before times, 2015.

1:23 And so I do really want to emphasize that this was before it was published,

1:26 before anyone was taking Donald Trump seriously.

1:28 Right?

1:29 And and Matt wrote I'm I'm going to quote it

1:31 because it really just in hindsight it really hits you.

1:35 If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis,

1:38 it's because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis.

1:42 The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next 5 years,

1:46 but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one

1:50 of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes?

1:53 Do you really trust Congress that much?

1:57 So what is this breakdown that you were worried about, Matt?

2:02 And and I do want to talk about whether we're in it in a second,

2:05 but first I want to understand, right?

2:06 Like people are warning about American democracy collapsing.

2:09 You predicted American democracy collapsing.

2:11 Why did you predict that?

2:13 Yeah, I I was thinking, you know, not about Donald Trump or the particulars

2:18 of his personality or the particular nature of right-wing populism,

2:24 but about the structural properties of the American political system.

2:29 And I was elaborating on on the work

2:31 of the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz,

2:34 who had this observation that these presidential

2:38 type systems had always broken down

2:40 every place that they were tried except for the United States of America.

2:45 And, you know, he he wrote an essay in the early 1990s

2:48 and he was saying like why is America the exception to this rule?

2:52 And his take was that American political

2:56 parties were unusually low discipline and unusually non-ideological,

3:02 that they were these sort

3:03 of catch-all geographically very dispersed political parties.

3:08 Clearly, if you look at the time between 1994 and 2014,

3:13 that stops being true, right?

3:16 America moves to a much more tight

3:20 ideologically organized party system to, you know,

3:23 just yesterday I I last week rather I was saying,

3:27 you know, it's a shame that Democrats can't recruit former

3:31 Governor John Bel Edwards to run for the Louisiana Senate seat.

3:35 And, you know, people were telling me, well, it's like there's no point.

3:41 Um Louisiana's too red of a state.

3:43 You know, it doesn't matter who you recruit, it doesn't matter what you do.

3:46 And, you know, whether that's true or not, as a mentality, as an observation,

3:52 that's a sign of the rise of national ideologically coherent,

3:57 disciplined political parties rather than the traditional American model where,

4:02 you know, there would be a Louisiana Democratic Party and it would

4:05 just be very different from what you had elsewhere and there would be,

4:09 you know, a a Massachusetts Republican Party and and and looseness.

4:13 So, you know, I I was saying in advance of Trump,

4:16 in advance of this sort of mainstreaming of concern about democracy,

4:21 that the Obama era crises that we were having,

4:25 these standoffs over the debt ceiling, the multiple government shutdowns,

4:30 um him exerting executive authority over immigration in unusual ways,

4:34 that these were signs of the United States moving in a more,

4:38 I guess you would call it a a Latin

4:40 American type direction where the president and Congress

4:44 are ultimately going to butt heads and they

4:48 are both going to appeal to the people,

4:52 the military, the bureaucracy, whatever it is,

4:55 to say, you know, my way or the highway.

4:59 And and we saw um Nayib Bukele in in El Salvador, um you know,

5:04 has essentially pulled off a a classic Latin

5:08 American uh democratic collapse um several years ago where,

5:13 you know, he was he was clashing with Congress over something.

5:16 He was very popular.

5:17 He just kind of had the army come

5:18 in to parliament um and then he like purged the judiciary,

5:23 changed the constitution, etc.

5:25 etc.

5:25 etc.

5:26 Um and something like that could come to the United States is what I was saying.

5:32 American democracy is in the middle of a crisis, right?

5:34 I think we we all agree on that.

5:37 But it's not the classic Juan Linz crisis that you anticipated,

5:41 you described a similar scenario playing out in Honduras, right?

5:44 Where there's like these dual claims to authority between the legislature

5:48 and the executive and both claim reasonably to be the people.

5:51 The standoff can't be resolved and ultimately

5:53 the armed forces or someone has to step in.

5:55 That's not what's happening.

5:56 What's happening in the United States right

5:57 now is there's an executive who is just

6:00 doing whatever he wants and Congress isn't claiming

6:02 authority because Congress is part of his party, controlled by his party.

6:06 They're And so is the Supreme Court.

6:08 And so there's not even a a trilateral authority question.

6:10 There's no There's no question.

6:12 It's mostly just the president doing what he wants

6:15 and the other institutions kind of letting him do it.

6:18 So it's it's a little bit different, I think, Oh, I agree.

6:20 I mean, people ask me about this article

6:22 all the time because I'm not constantly bringing it

6:24 up because actually what I was talking about

6:27 there is pretty different from what's going on now.

6:31 You know, I I made in that article

6:33 some very definitive predictions about the future.

6:36 At my more mature self would just admit to more uncertainty about everything.

6:41 But I do think that the sort of basic

6:43 structural question that that piece raises can get

6:47 a little bit underrated these days relative to things

6:50 that are idiosyncratic to Trump um because you know,

6:55 he he's such a spectacular figure.

6:57 Like he gets a lot of attention, deservedly so,

7:01 but that can like blot out everything else that's that's going on at times.

7:05 Yeah, I want to be clear on my agenda here.

7:06 So I'm not trying to slam you personally.

7:09 I'm not like Matt, you didn't predict that we would elect this Well,

7:12 also I mean, that would be weird to just drag Yeah, to to invite you on.

7:15 No, no, no.

7:15 I'm just I'm I'm just trying to give due credit to the weirdness of history.

7:20 Yeah, look, what what I'm trying to do

7:22 more is probe the like whole whole Linzean

7:24 framework cuz I'm I'm I'm a little bit

7:27 skeptical that it diagnoses it diagnoses a way,

7:30 like a sort of symptom of a problem, but there often times it seems like it's

7:34 being caused by a deeper problem in the system.

7:36 The system, right, can output crises in various different ways,

7:39 however you structure it.

7:40 The Linzean critique is that it can break down

7:46 over frankly fairly I I don't want to say minor,

7:49 but like non-existential controversies, right?

7:54 That like you just have a disagreement between Barack Obama and Paul

7:58 Ryan about what the trajectory of the welfare state should be.

8:02 And it's like in retrospect it feels weird where people think that like,

8:08 oh, those were the good old days, right?

8:09 Like we weren't in this constant despair.

8:11 And it's true, like normal people were not in a state of constant despair about

8:15 the state of American politics in 2012

8:17 because the argument it was like heavily fiscalized.

8:20 It was about important, earnest, but like boring stuff.

8:25 And yet you couldn't just like meet in the middle and compromise.

8:31 And you also couldn't just like pass a bill that reflected

8:35 what one people liked and resolve it at the next election.

8:38 You had this thing where it was like for the government to function,

8:42 congressional Republicans needed to write a bill

8:46 and then the Democratic president needed to sign it.

8:49 The country almost defaulted and lots of people, like myself included,

8:55 were saying at that time that like you know,

8:59 like Obama shouldn't give in to this hostage taking.

9:02 He should invoke the 14th Amendment.

9:04 He should do, you know, X Y Z, blah blah blah blah blah.

9:07 Mint the coin.

9:07 Mint the trillion dollar coin, yeah.

9:09 And, you know, so this was like a very mainstream

9:11 center-left take was that the president should resort to gimmicks.

9:19 I I don't know what you want to call them.

9:20 I I don't want to overstate, but you know, move outside the bounds of normative

9:26 politics to sidestep this hostage taking tactic,

9:32 which itself was outside the bounds of normative politics,

9:36 but has become increasingly normalized over time.

9:39 And then I think House Democrats will feel pressured to use.

9:44 Um there's this political scientist her name is Laura Gamboa and she

9:47 studies the strategies that opposition parties

9:49 use in cases of democratic backsliding.

9:52 It's like one of the only people doing really rigorous,

9:53 interesting work about this.

9:55 Uh and the Venezuelan opposition back when Chavez was still consolidating power,

10:00 really screwed up badly.

10:02 Right?

10:02 And her view, uh, the reason they screwed up badly is that they

10:05 pushed too hard and ended up backing an attempted coup against Chavez.

10:09 Mhm.

10:09 And the coup failed.

10:10 Right?

10:11 And the coup failed and that gave Chavez

10:14 a pretext to to start really being authoritarian.

10:18 Right?

10:18 Because then it's, beforehand we can sort of try to push

10:22 at the edges and see what popular what people will support.

10:25 But afterwards, he's like, they tried to overthrow me.

10:26 I need to protect the sovereignty of our country

10:28 from America and these coup plotters and Chavez government.

10:30 they felt that Chavez was so obviously a threat

10:34 to the stability of Venezuelan institutions that it justified,

10:38 uh, this coup effort.

10:40 But then the coup becomes the justification for uh,

10:45 you know, hyper-empowering of of Chavez.

10:48 Um, not just domestically,

10:49 but but but I think I I think in the international arena,

10:53 you know, a lot of left-of-center people,

10:56 um, were sympathetic to that because there's, you know,

11:01 hostility to the record of right-wing coup efforts, um, in Latin America.

11:07 Right.

11:07 And and so the point I think that sort of nicely encapsulates your point, right?

11:11 She ends up coming to this conclusion

11:14 that the optimal opposition strategies are,

11:16 I forget the exact language, but it's something like moderate and institutional.

11:20 Is that instead of trying to overthrow the government

11:24 through military coup or even something more subtle, right?

11:26 Be like, we're going to stage a general strike

11:27 until they hold new elections or something like that.

11:30 What you do is you use leverage points in institutions, right?

11:33 Votes in Congress and, uh, you know,

11:37 maybe you can stage some demonstrations that are

11:39 designed to support this particular leverage point,

11:41 say try to stop bills from coming through that would

11:44 restrict your ability to participate in elections and then you

11:46 participate in elections and you get power back to a degree

11:49 and you start trying to reverse what they did.

11:51 But that those are two very different oppositional approaches, right?

11:55 The very confrontational one and one that really just

11:58 tries to work within the framework of the existing system.

12:01 But, you know, I spoke to her about

12:02 this and one thing that she says that she's changed

12:04 her mind on since early work is the role

12:07 of sort of extra-institutional strategies

12:10 in supporting those institutional pushes.

12:11 Like a protest that is designed to back up what a party is doing.

12:15 Um, and and to me that suggests is when we're thinking

12:19 about like how do you deal with these particular institutional crises,

12:24 you need to have a sort of broader framework for what oppositional politics

12:29 before we even get to the question of how to fix systemic design, right?

12:32 You have to answer the question of what do you do

12:34 in the system that is not working very well for a variety of reasons.

12:38 You know, I mean, there's there's a there's a question of tactics, right?

12:41 And there's a question of of substance.

12:43 And I think that's something that we've seen,

12:45 you know, throughout both Trump terms is that, you know,

12:47 mass demonstrations, um, you know, continue to be an efficacious,

12:52 uh, way to get things done,

12:54 uh, particularly if you, as was happening in in Minneapolis,

12:58 are concerned about like a specific object level grievance,

13:03 like you can you can make real progress, um, that way.

13:06 Um, there's there's lots of great work that's been done on, you know,

13:09 the strategic logic of of nonviolent resistance and I

13:12 think you really saw that play out in in Minneapolis.

13:15 Um, there's a question of the substance, right?

13:19 Like I think that most, um, I don't know, most, many,

13:25 and I think most center-left intellectuals have

13:29 reacted to the Trump years by adopting the view that the opposition party needs

13:36 to adopt a more substantively radical agenda.

13:41 You know, um, AOC was at the Munich Security Conference and and she

13:45 was making the case for this, that the fact that these, um,

13:50 authoritarian populist movements are gaining support

13:52 in her mind is evidence that dramatic uh,

13:58 substantive policy change from the left, uh, needs to happen.

14:02 Um, Waleed Shahid, uh, has has made this case, um,

14:06 criticizing me several times on his his Substack to say that like if liberalism,

14:11 uh, feels like it's it's being eaten away by a left-right horseshoe,

14:16 that shows that like center-left liberals need to become more radical.

14:21 Uh, my first boss, my, uh, you know,

14:23 you know, mentor in in many respects in this game,

14:25 Michael Tomasky, um, has a new piece out in in The New Republic, you know,

14:31 reflecting his his deep thoughts on what what Democrats need to do

14:34 from here and it's like Democrats need to go like all in on anti-billionaire,

14:40 um, kind of politics and he did,

14:44 um, interview, uh, you know, with the on a TNR podcast,

14:47 Greg Sargent hosting is is talking to Tomasky and, you know,

14:52 Tomasky starts saying there, um, well, you know,

14:55 all these guys like Bezos and Zuckerberg, um,

15:00 they're supporting Republicans now and Tomasky says like in good riddance,

15:03 like we don't need those guys, we shouldn't be taking their money, um, etc.

15:07 etc.

15:08 And you know, in the really recent past, right?

15:13 Like everybody is mad, everybody in Washington, D.C.

15:16 is mad at Jeff Bezos because of what's happening with The Washington Post.

15:20 In Trump's first term,

15:22 Jeff Bezos was an excellent steward of The Washington Post.

15:26 You know, he supported them, uh,

15:28 as they did excellent prize-winning reporting on the Trump administration.

15:32 Those journalists were repeatedly attacked by the Trump administration.

15:36 Trump also engaged in very classic authoritarian tactics, targeting Bezos.

15:42 You know, Trump was trying to damage

15:43 Amazon's business interests to retaliate against,

15:47 um, Bezos's stewardship of the Post.

15:51 Joe Biden becomes president and appoints an FTC chair,

15:58 you know, who is very young, very smart, but very young, uh, a little,

16:02 you know, underqualified, uh, for this kind of gig,

16:05 but who would become a big celebrity in left intellectual

16:08 circles because she wrote an essay saying that the basic

16:12 framework of American antitrust policy needs to be altered specifically

16:17 in order to be bad for the interests of Amazon.

16:21 Now, you know, maybe she's right.

16:24 Who knows?

16:25 Uh, but to me, if you're going to start like ranting

16:28 and raving about like like why are these guys all supporting Trump now,

16:31 like well, that's why.

16:33 You know, like if you if you take if as a wealthy person,

16:38 you take risks under an authoritarian, uh, interlude,

16:43 you come out on the other side of it

16:45 and like the newly empowered opposition just starts saying like,

16:50 you're[ __] no matter what as long as we're in, like

16:53 of course those politics are going to swing against you.

16:57 Um, and, you know, I think that this cycle of radicalization on the substance

17:05 of policy is essentially entrenching Trump's power

17:11 in a way that is really risky.

17:13 And so you have that on like

17:14 an elite level in dealing with the business community,

17:17 but you also have it in dealing with, you know,

17:20 policy questions that touch on mass opinion, that it's hard,

17:24 I think, to defend democracy uh, without being willing to, um,

17:30 accept like the actual existing cultural views

17:34 of the mass public and that to an extent

17:38 that itself is part of the crisis of democracy that we're seeing in the West,

17:43 part of why some of these multi-party systems in in northern Europe

17:47 are able to navigate it more successfully is that they allow for um,

17:53 a modicum of accommodation without, uh,

17:58 the center-left leaders needing to like compromise themselves.

18:02 You know, in a way that people find distasteful or unworthy,

18:05 um, or or or something else like that.

18:07 And so you can you can offer people

18:09 like normal politics as a solution to these things,

18:14 whereas I feel like I I read these takes on like what

18:17 Democrats should be doing and they

18:19 are essentially promising endless crisis politics,

18:23 uh, but just saying like we're we're going to win it this time,

18:26 um, which to me is like a very dangerous game.

18:29 When there's a perception that democracy is on the line,

18:32 a widely shared one, then it can unite previously fractious opposition groups.

18:38 You saw this in Poland in the last election, right?

18:40 They Right.

18:41 And then you see in Hungary right now, actually,

18:43 there's an alignment behind a center-right candidate who shouldn't win,

18:46 but because he's been able to break through

18:48 and he has unified support of the opposition, he actually might overcome a super

18:52 authoritarian electoral infrastructure and win.

18:56 Uh, and so it it and all of that, like it

18:58 is really essential to highlight partially the corruption of the regime,

19:02 but also that in question,

19:03 but also to to use democracy as an umbrella as an umbrella

19:09 issue that not only guides where you choose to pick fights,

19:12 but also like who it is that you include.

19:15 I think that democracy has been invoked in anti-Trump politics, uh,

19:19 by or I should say by Democratic Party

19:21 politicians in anti-Trump politics in fairly superficial ways.

19:26 You know, that, um, Joe Biden becomes president and you know,

19:32 there's a world in which there are several

19:37 prominent Republicans in his cabinet and he is saying,

19:42 I'm going to be a one-term president.

19:45 Uh, the mission of this presidency is simply to sort of, um,

19:50 secure accountability for the perpetrators of January 6th,

19:54 to get the country out of COVID.

19:58 There is going to be a primary in the Democratic

20:00 Party as to who should be my successor.

20:03 And like those people will argue about how much of an aggressive

20:07 policy agenda should we be trying to push in 2025?

20:10 But like I am trying to stabilize the country in partnership with Mitt Romney,

20:15 Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski,

20:17 like all these Republican senators who like voted Trump.

20:21 And the second thing who support NATO.

20:23 And there was clearly a side of Joe Biden who wanted to be that president.

20:28 You know what I mean?

20:28 There were like things he said that clearly spoke to it.

20:31 But at the end of the day,

20:33 the Democratic Party base, but also the Democratic Party elite,

20:38 like the the policy demanders in the Democratic Party did not want that.

20:44 They wanted aggressive action on climate change.

20:49 Um, you know, um, uh, Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, um,

20:53 will be out of the Senate soon because

20:54 he voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges.

20:58 Um, the Biden administration wanted to shut down uh,

21:02 offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

21:04 because that's like a policy objective of theirs.

21:08 They didn't say like, well, we've got an ally,

21:11 you know, in Louisiana on the preservation of democracy.

21:13 And like we've got to work with him.

21:15 And we've got to work with Senator

21:16 Murkowski on on Alaska's natural resource management.

21:19 And you know, to me, that is a choice to not center democracy.

21:26 Whether or not you sometimes give a speech

21:28 about how the MAGA movement is undemocratic.

21:31 Right.

21:32 It it it is a choice to treat this as normal politics.

21:37 So, I um, I I just got back from Brazil.

21:39 And Brazil's a presidential system, but they also,

21:41 and we haven't talked about this yet, they also have a multi-party system.

21:44 Yes.

21:45 And that that made a huge difference when Jair Bolsonaro was president.

21:48 If you're not familiar with him, Matt, I know you are,

21:50 but if you're he he was basically he wanted

21:54 to act a lot like Trump did, I would say.

21:56 He was called the Trump of the tropics, that was his moniker.

21:58 He wasn't quite as aggressive with executive authority,

22:00 but he's a lot more aggressive than people remembered.

22:02 And then of course he at the end of his time he plotted an outright coup, right?

22:06 Like an actual military coup.

22:08 And they did their own version of January 6th on January 8th.

22:11 Um, and what's what's interesting is like I went

22:14 there to go study why their Congress and Supreme Court

22:18 were much more resistant during his time in office

22:20 to executive power grab type tactics than what we're seeing um,

22:25 in the US right now.

22:26 And like it turns out, I tried to resist this conclusion because I I

22:30 didn't it wasn't my prior when I went there,

22:32 but it turns out like a bunch of the answers the multi-party system.

22:35 Brazil has something like 20 parties currently registered in in its Congress.

22:40 And that made it incredibly difficult not only for Bolsonaro to like

22:44 jam through legislation cuz the Brazilian

22:46 system works on pork barrel trading basically.

22:48 Uh, but it also made it like really hard for him or any other

22:52 president to get partisan Supreme Court justices

22:54 through who were just like pure partisans.

22:56 So, the Supreme Court ends up being this like very rule of law,

22:58 good government group of people who are like sending

23:00 private text messages in 2020 about how Bolsonaro was Hitler.

23:04 And like are really working to organize against him.

23:06 Uh, and so it just it does really seem like there are institutional constraints

23:13 from the two-party system that mess

23:16 with the way the party makes decisions and makes

23:18 it just a lot more difficult to adopt a kind of popular front pro-democracy

23:25 movement than in in the way

23:27 that you've seen in some other backsliding democracies.

23:30 Yeah, no, no, no.

23:30 I mean I I I completely agree that there's no And this is why,

23:33 you know, I I advocated strongly back in 2021, 2022.

23:40 I was really hoping that you could get um,

23:45 uh, now former Senator Manchin, um, then Senator Romney,

23:50 Murkowski to form some kind of cross-party

23:54 caucus that would because clearly Manchin and Sinema,

23:58 probably some other Democrats,

24:00 were not thrilled with the direction that things were going in.

24:05 And I thought that there was a chance in the institutional

24:09 mechanisms of the American Congress to like actually pump the brakes there,

24:16 which was not like the way the Biden administration

24:18 was pursuing its legislative agenda was not a democratic crisis,

24:22 um, to be clear, but I think that it was not, um,

24:25 appropriately responsive to the democratic crisis that had

24:29 put them into office in the first place.

24:32 And that there was a need to find a way, um,

24:35 through the the logic of the American institutions,

24:39 which is just not friendly, right?

24:41 That if you if you look at what happened in the Biden years,

24:44 it was as if none of this Trump stuff had ever happened.

24:48 It was just the most normal thing in the world

24:50 that like you come in, you have a new trifecta,

24:53 it's really really narrow, but you brush off the fact that it's narrow,

24:58 and you just take your coalition's entire agenda, copy and paste it in, and then

25:03 the most moderate members of your parties are like, whoa, that's too much.

25:06 And so they edit it down, and then some of it goes through,

25:10 and then there's backlash in the public, and you lose ground in the midterms.

25:14 That's just like every American president's, right?

25:17 And the and the exception to that is the freak 9/11 midterms, um, of of 2002.

25:24 And that's weird, right?

25:27 Like it's it's weird to in what like I would say, you would say,

25:32 but also Joe Biden would say were like extraordinary times,

25:36 at critical times for American democracy, to just operate like on autopilot.

25:41 Um, but that is because the logic

25:44 of these political institutions is very powerful.

25:47 Like every administration, democratic backsliding or not,

25:51 like makes this exact same overreaching backlash mistake.

25:56 So, it's like I I mean, you know,

25:57 as a journalist we often call things mistakes, but as as uh,

26:02 informed deep thinking people, you're like,

26:05 am I really smarter than like every president

26:08 who's ever held office in post-World War II?

26:10 Or is it like not a mistake, right?

26:12 It's like it's something about the logic of the situation causes

26:17 people to do the thing that is not really smart, right?

26:22 And in a different institution, if you have a multi-party Congress,

26:26 it's like you can't do that.

26:27 There's just always some centrally positioned party

26:30 institutionally whose job is to be like,

26:33 "Ha ha ha, no, you can't do your agenda.

26:35 Like we've got to do some horse trading." I do

26:38 have to say that I am more persuaded after going

26:42 to Brazil that a multi-party coalitional system a coalitional presidential

26:46 system would work in the United States than I was beforehand.

26:50 Mhm.

26:50 Which is not to say I like have an here's how

26:52 to get from A to B as to how to do that, right?

26:55 That remains the big problem for any kind of structural

26:58 reform in American politics is they're all fundamentally precluded

27:01 by the incentives of the two parties that exist right

27:04 now who want to continue to exist in their current form.

27:07 But if there's anything that could push for like that could like break through,

27:11 this would be a constitutional crisis, right?

27:13 Or some kind of just not to say I'm rooting for that.

27:15 I'm saying that the worst things get,

27:17 the greater the possibility is for some kind of radical structural reform.

27:22 Well, and that was fundamentally the point of my piece

27:26 was to try to say that like I don't I did not think at that time that it

27:32 was very likely that we would avert uh, crisis fully.

27:37 But that if we understood the kind of institutional, um,

27:42 drivers of crisis, there was a better chance that when a crisis arose,

27:49 we would try to adapt in a in a useful way to it rather than I mean,

27:55 it's hard to know, right?

27:57 Um, but again, a part of my point was that we have

27:59 a tradition in a history in Latin

28:01 America of like backsliding and then resliding,

28:06 but then backsliding again because you haven't like done anything,

28:11 um, about this, right?

28:13 So, like, um, Venezuela has had uh, a lot of back and forths,

28:19 um, over the years um, in in different kinds of things.

28:22 And that, you know, what you want is what Brazil had, right?

28:25 Which was that they came out of their last, um,

28:28 period of military rule with a different constitutional system that, um,

28:34 some people uh, say is now like more more robust,

28:38 um, than the one that they had before.

28:40 And like that's good.

28:41 That's a good idea.

28:43 Especially because I mean,

28:45 I was not envisioning like an actual military dictatorship and, you know,

28:50 um, hard authoritarian rule.

28:53 But it's like, you know,

28:55 the the president has command control authority over all these people,

29:00 uh, people with guns, um, and it's always it's always out there

29:05 as a possibility that orders are given and orders are followed.

29:09 And if there's some legal stamp on it, like why wouldn't they be followed?

29:14 This actually is the big mystery of the Brazilian case,

29:16 incidentally, is like why the military said no to the coup.

29:18 Cuz they were offered it.

29:19 There was a a sit-down meeting where there was a plan presented to them.

29:22 And like two out of the three top generals said no.

29:25 The the admiral, the head of the navy, said yes,

29:27 but the head of the air force and the army

29:28 and the army guy who's really the one who mattered said no.

29:31 Hard to do a coup with boats.

29:33 Yeah, exactly.

29:34 That's basically the wrong branch of the armed forces.

29:37 No, he got the wrong one.

29:38 And to like to this day nobody knows why.

29:40 So, right?

29:41 So, so to that point, right?

29:42 It's like when it when politics get

29:44 down to that point of constitutional rupture,

29:47 it's it's not even clear that presidential

29:50 command and control authority is what matters.

29:52 What matters are is the decisions made by the guys

29:55 who command the loyalty of the people with guns.

29:58 Sure.

29:58 And again, I mean notably notably what some of the first stuff that Trump

30:03 did was in a legal but highly

30:05 irregular way change up the senior military command.

30:10 Right.

30:10 Yep.

30:11 And in the United States and you know this is

30:13 one reason that I'm always like people ask me

30:15 questions about stuff and I'm always like oh it's complicated

30:17 because sometimes a president does something that's like flagrantly illegal.

30:23 Right?

30:23 Other times a president does something that's like

30:25 100% the most legal thing in the world.

30:28 There is no doubt that the president of the United States

30:31 is within his rights to relieve the chairman of the Joint

30:34 Chiefs of Staff and replace him with somebody else of his choosing

30:37 who will then be duly submitted to the Senate for confirmation.

30:40 That is like an unquestioned legitimate presidential power.

30:44 But it would be so much more eyebrow raising

30:48 as a turn of events than you know you like issue

30:54 an executive order about like some regulatory agency and then

30:58 the court's like lol no that's not what the law says.

31:01 You're breaking the law man.

31:03 Because as you say like what matters on some

31:06 level is like what happens when orders were given.

31:11 You you know you're talking about like

31:12 we don't really know what happened in Brazil.

31:14 I I think it remains slightly unclear exactly

31:17 what was going on on January 6th Yeah.

31:20 at the highest levels of the American government.

31:22 I mean there is a a view that you know Nancy Pelosi

31:28 and the Joint Chiefs and Mike Pence kind of like worked something out.

31:34 Yeah it's it's it's a very difficult to divine from the public record.

31:38 You look at this and you're like is that there certainly was a period

31:41 of time when Trump wasn't doing anything and yet National Guard were deployed.

31:46 And so did so what what happened there?

31:49 Right.

31:50 I mean and it seems like he was de facto taken out of command authority.

31:59 That's to say really.

32:02 And you know and maybe in some ways this was unwise right?

32:04 I mean Mitch McConnell and Trump seem to have

32:10 either through explicit understanding or or just mutual convergence right?

32:14 Around like Trump was not convicted of impeachment

32:17 charges and also Trump stopped messing around.

32:21 You know for the final weeks of his his presidency and like

32:24 perhaps it would have been all for the better if Trump had

32:27 like issued flagrantly illegal orders and forced the question on the Senate

32:33 and like been removed from office and had the heartbreak inside the Republican

32:38 Party between you know the the MAGA cult and the conservative defenders

32:44 of of democracy but instead we got that in a in a soft

32:47 way and and it's all it's all come back and we

32:50 you know it's like Susan Collins just up for re-election in Maine.

32:57 And but she voted to impeach Trump right?

33:00 But like she's in the Republican Party

33:01 and voting to confirm these judicial appointees and like

33:05 it's it's a very vexing situation for everybody

33:07 and you know I guess she'll probably

33:09 lose in in November but um I guess like my main point about everything is

33:16 that just like ratcheting up polarization is not

33:22 really the solution to these kinds of things.

33:25 Like you you I I would also vote

33:28 to defeat Susan Collins at election in Maine but it's

33:32 like in a stable democracy you need there

33:35 to be some people who are right of center.

33:39 You need like people who stand for right of center ideas

33:43 but like also stand for democracy and and constitutionalism and we keep instead

33:48 just like grinding those people out as they fail to do anything

33:51 efficacious and as our institutions don't

33:54 mediate any kind of stable coalition formation.

33:57 Matt I unfortunately have to let you go.

33:59 That's going to do it for us after a conversation

34:01 I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

34:03 This episode was produced by Beth Morsey and Thorn Newwriter.

34:07 It was edited by Jorge Just engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala.

34:11 Theme song is by Emma Munger.

34:13 The show is part of Vox.

34:15 Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today.

34:18 Go to vox.com/members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because

34:22 of this show let us know and specifically

34:24 let them know it's because of me right?

34:25 Not Sean me.

34:27 And then Matt thanks for being here.

34:30 While I can plug myself where can people find your work?

34:34 Find me mostly on my substack slowboring.com.

34:38 I also have a new a new experiment I'm doing

34:40 where I have AI writing articles about local news in DC.

34:44 It's called DC local.substack.com and it's

34:48 I think a pretty cool interesting experiment.

34:50 what I understand the robot's trained on your writing style right?

34:52 So you can actually get like it's Robo Matt really writing this stuff.

34:55 I mean it's very insulting to me to see what

34:58 AI thinks I write like but you know that's fine.

35:02 All right.

35:02 You heard the man right?

35:03 Go subscribe to Matt's website and and Robo Matt's local politics website.

35:07 You should go listen to both of them.

35:09 Thanks Matt Matt thanks for coming.

35:10 It's great talking to you about this stuff.

35:13 Thanks for watching.

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