Latest / America's Why Project / Episode 19: Insecure Majorities: Why Congress Doesn’t Work

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Episode 19: Insecure Majorities: Why Congress Doesn’t Work · America's Why Project

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Democracy is not just about making sure that the winners win.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's about making sure that the losers are protected.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the America's Why Podcast.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm your host, Matt Levinger.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: In today's episode, we're shifting gears and moving to a new zone of storytelling, namely the United States Congress, to talk about the functionality and dysfunctionality of congressional storytelling.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: In early August 2026, I sat down with my friend and colleague Casey Burgett.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Casey is the director of the Legislative Affairs Program at the George Washington University and host of its Mastering the Room podcast, which poses the question Is there any common ground left in our hyper-politicized world?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: In addressing the question of why Congress is so broken and what might be done to fix it, Casey often starts by talking about a concept that his dissertation advisor, the political scientist Francis Lee, proposed in her book Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I asked Casey to start by telling us a little bit about how this idea of insecure majorities has shaped his thinking about the operations of Congress in the contemporary world.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: It was really a very simple concept that ended up being an incredibly insightful concept explaining the incentive structure within Congress.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: And here it's really important to keep in mind that what we see today is not always what it was, right?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: We think of Congress as like this very static, slow-moving, if ever changing institution, but it really recently, at least historically speaking, was very, very different.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so what she put to paper and studied and really convincingly argued is that prior to 1980 was this magic cut point.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Before that, Democrats were the be-all end-all in congressional politics.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Every single election now, including the midterms we have coming up in 2026 and then for the foreseeable future, we are not incredibly confident about who's going to win majority status.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: You're not willing to bet$10, let alone your mortgage, on who, what party is going to gain majority status.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Before 1980 in the Senate and then 1994 with Newt Gingrich's contract with America in the House, Democrats ran shot.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: They had huge, huge, huge majorities that were just untouchable for Republicans.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: And when you have those untouchable majorities, it creates a certain incentive structure for the minority party.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: If they know they're not going to have a shot at gaining majority status, the only way they get something done in Congress is to work with the majority who then is willing to give them something up, right?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like because of relationships, because they fear whoever's going to replace this minority.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: They're going to let most of those guys come back, but they're not going to give them everything they want.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: If you have a competition for majority status, if you're in the minority and you think that you have a genuine shot at the majority, which has been true for the most recent generations and will be for the foreseeable future, your incentive structure is to make the majority look back.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Your incentive structure is to obstruct and say that they are incompetent, thereby being a self-fulfilling prophecy for your campaign, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: For your party, saying, they're so bad at the job, why would you ever send them back to be majority members again?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Give us a chance at the majority.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so by stopping and objecting, uh, obstructing, not compromising, it creates kind of this confrontational politics because of that insecure majority.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: If you're not sure about who's going to maintain uh majority status next election, your whole goal as the minority is to vote no and regain the majority for your party because then you can get something done on your terms rather than having to compromise with the other side.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one of the things I find really compelling about this notion of insecure majorities is that it changes our thinking about congressional behavior from being one of character to one of structural conditions.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, it's easy for one party to say, look, the other side is so obstructionist, they're just trying to gum up the works, or the other party is trying to ramrod, you know, ram things through uh uh uh while they still have the majority.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's easy to ascribe really uh negative motives to the other side.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas what you're suggesting is that each side mirrors each other's behavior based on the conditions of the game.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you change the rules of the game, then you change the behavior.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, don't hate the player, hate the game, right?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is a uh a team sport as much as we hate or think that it shouldn't be that way.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: It has always been true.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: We are in a two-party system uh where if you have majority status, you chair committees, you have access to the floor, you get votes on things that you want, you keep things off the floor that you don't want to talk about, like hello, the Epstein files for majority Republicans right now.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um you get to investigate, which is an incredibly powerful tool in a polarized era.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: So majority status comes with huge benefits.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And in the minority, you have access to none of those things.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: You are dependent on the majority to help you get things done.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so your question about character is uh versus structure is is along the right lines, except for when you realize like everything that we hate about politics is rational for them.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And we as voters and our system incentivizes this type of behavior anyway, is that voters expect their members to obstruct to the other side, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: We see full campaign promises of elect us to Congress and we will stop Trump.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: We will stop the Republicans, we will stop the Democratic Socialists taking over America.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: It becomes a binary choice.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: And when we have a polarized electorate, which we do now at very historical levels, and the the lack of competitive elections across 90% of our House and Senate seats, we create an incentive structure where their job is to respond to the polarized electorate.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: So if you have a polarized voting base, you're gonna get a polarized membership within Congress.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: They're going to exacerbate a lot of those perverse incentive structures to obstruct rather than compromise.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but it is also not irrational.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: I don't care how much character you have, your job is to represent your constituents back home.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're doing that enough to keep them coming back and winning the primaries and winning general elections, then you can sleep well at night saying you're doing your job as a member of Congress.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is it going too far to say that the structural conditions of political competition in contemporary America incentivize toxic behavior on both sides?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: No, not too far at all.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, turn on anything you see right now, you're gonna see it.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I say I'm gonna say incentive structure a billion times in these interviews because that's what it is, right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: Humans are reduced to this type of environment, especially if their job is dependent on third-party actors like voters.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna respond.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: So as much as we criticize politicians for chasing votes, they should.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's their job.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the alternative of them not chasing votes is even worse.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: That means they're only caring about themselves.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: At least right now, they have to do enough to be sent back.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the incentive structure right now, especially in a very grid-locked Congress where it's hard to get things done legislatively, you're gonna have to fill the time with something.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: And if your job, your whole uh campaign is built on making the other side look bad and you can't legislate, then you're gonna do everything you can to look bad.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: And in a social media, cable news 24-7 political environment, you're gonna lead to thing.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: This is chasing the clip, right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Chasing something for social media, chasing something for a cable news network.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not enough to just be uh rainbows and butterflies and puppies when everyone's pissed off at politics.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Then you lean into that and you make the other side look bad in those clips on the platforms where they're seeing these things.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: So it is this doom loop of dysfunction that really has downstream effects where it becomes incredibly performative in committee hearings, in press conferences, even press releases and tweets or exes, whatever we're calling them.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like their incentive structure is to be performative because they don't, they're not rewarded for the policy making, right?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: Like you, you members of voters, the voting public doesn't know who wrote what bill, right?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: But they do know how bad you owned the libs on your last uh social media performance, or how how effectively you questioned the nominee in your committee hearing.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's what gets you attention, that's what gets you noticed, and ultimately that's what gets you votes.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Casey, it's so interesting to hear you talk about performative action because that was a word that that one of our recent interviewees, uh Professor Harry Hahn of Johns Hopkins University, used.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: She was comparing performative action, which is about looking good, from uh from strategic action, which is about solving the problem.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like what you're saying is that Congress is all about performative action these days.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I struggle to paint with all of the brushes because we're talking about 535 different members, and they're not all the same.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: But you do see the same names popping up on all of your social media channels and definitely on TV.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: So my rule of thumb that I tell folks is there are just as many good faith legislators, but you're never gonna hear their names because they're not the where they're not on information sources where you're watching.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're the ones doing the day-to-day work, putting their nose to the grindstone.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: They exist, I promise you, but they're not the loudest in the room.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: They're not the ones that are who are the most combative and the ones who are likely to get the most attention, uh, which feeds this beast.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it is not uh uh all of them are horrible and deserve to find a new job, uh, but there are plenty of them who are, let's say, just cashing in on the incentive structure to be the loudest, biggest flamethrowers in the room because that's where they get their attention and their fundraising appeal, right?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: And you can say this about the right and left to varying degrees because you're always you're probably thinking of the same names, uh, depending on what political affiliation you have of flamethrowers uh versus good faith legislators.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um the flamethrowers are the ones that have built up their brands that make them more influential in the chamber.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: AOC is a great example on the left, right?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Where she's incredibly combative, she's very uh a good uh legislator, she's focused, she's detailed oriented, but she's not a frame of afraid of the camera.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: And she uses that to her advantage, where as a relatively junior member, she has more influence in the chamber than her position should ever have allowed her.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so there's this in this new environment, there are members who recognize that I don't have to be dependent on my years of experience, I don't have to be dependent on the party, I don't have to put my time in anymore if I bring this clout with me.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: But that clout requires you to pay attention to the performance as well.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is a podcast that's about storytelling.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the premise of the podcast is that uh if we can do a better job of telling good stories and listening to each other's stories, it'll help us solve hard problems together.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and this perhaps seems like a very idealistic premise uh when you when you're putting it up against uh the the culture of of Congress these days.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um but let's talk a little bit about what happens to good faith listening when efforts at uh legislating are subsumed into lots and lots of performative noise that's necessary to maintain the majority.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: So storytelling is important, and and both parties recognize this that if you can personalize the policy, you're in a much better position of advoc advocacy than you are of just talking numbers and stats and huge trillion dollar budgets and performances and things like that.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the storytelling does matter.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: But I hate to say this on your podcast about storytelling, it ain't enough.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: You can have the best stories in the world, but if you don't have kind of this secret sauce of charisma and messaging and timing and even luck, then you're just gonna be another person with the right idea at the wrong time.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: And there's plenty of those floating around.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is why I always tell students who just are convinced they say, I have the right idea about healthcare or climate change or guns or immigration.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: We know the answers to these things.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then you say things, all right, then why isn't it moving?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because politics, as much as you want to remove yourself from it or think that it doesn't matter or should be flushed down the toilet because it's it's obstructing everything, you have to understand how the place works.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: And to do that, you have to know where politicians sit, what their obstacles are, how they are a part of a collective body, even if they are just one of 100 of the Senate or one of 435, that's a very limiting position in terms of influence and power in a collective body.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of this matters.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: If you're not pulling all of the levers at the right time with the right messaging uh and the right story, uh, then you are just looking for a window to hopefully fall in your lap, and they very rarely do.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what's the kind of story that breaks through?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: The one that matches an answer to a problem that is undeniable, right?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and now in in our environment, right, it has to come with video evidence.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: It has to be seen.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: So we knew, let's take ice raids, for example.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: We knew these were going on, we saw reports and reporters of it, but it is when we saw the videos of the actual shootings take place that then change came.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: So you had to have the idea in my in my business, we call it politics, people, policy.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: You have to mix all of those.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: If you only have two of the three P's, you ain't getting anything done.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: But if you have all three at once, then you have an opportunity to get something done.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: So it has to come with attention, with the right answer, and an urgency, where it comes at more of a cost to do nothing for these politicians than it does for them getting credit for doing something proactively.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, that's all too often what gets things done.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: I want to step back a little bit and talk about some history.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're saying that up until around 1980, there were these massive majorities for the Democrats that we could count on election after election.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, the Democrats were perhaps a little bit more gracious to the opposition because they're not fighting for their lives.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the opposition, the Republican side, had to be kind of obsequious at some level.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: They they if they knew if they pissed off the Democrats too much that they were gonna get absolutely nowhere and possibly, you know, get severely punished uh moving forward into the indefinite future.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: So what changed?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how come we went from this era of persistent large Democratic majorities in the Congress, although of course not in the presidency?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the balancing act came in, right?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um how did we get to the point where there's near parity persistently, election after election, where in any given election cycle, you you just don't know who's gonna be hold the majority in the next Congress?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: It is such an important question, and one I'm gonna do a disservice and answering in the next minute.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: But here's my attempt at it, uh, because this is huge generational type changes.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's important to note that during this long run of Democratic majorities, huge Democratic majorities from basically FDR up to Reagan, and as you mentioned, we had Republican presidents in there.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: It is important to mention that what it meant to be a part of those two parties was incredibly different than it is today.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: We have now sorted.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: What in the 1960s, especially, what it meant to be a Democrat in the South was very different than what it meant to be a Democrat in the North.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: They shared the same party label, but they fundamentally disagreed, most notably on civil rights issues.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: That does no longer that no longer applies.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: We have sorted ourselves in an electorate for a lot of reasons, from a media environment, a campaign environment, just good party environments, where we've said, let's make this, if we're gonna have a binary choice, let's make it incredibly binary and our politics nationalized.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Meaning it went from being local, I know my representative, I may disagree with him a little bit, but at least I know him, I know his family, I trust him.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's just like, what party are you on?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Am I on your team or not?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: And what it means to be a Democrat almost uh on all issues, at least at the surface at the high levels on major issues from immigration to education to climate, all of it.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: What it means to be a Democrat in California is the same as in Maine, is the same as in Florida and Georgia.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: All of that was different.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so that changed over time.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: We had Nixon Southern realignment, where the party actually shifted from being Democrats to re being Republicans, even though that's how they voted when they were within Congress a lot of times, especially on civil rights issues.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: This is a long way of saying that over generations there have been a confluence of factors that just really incentivize the parties to separate from each other, and then voters polarized and sorted themselves on every single issue, where now we don't have what are called cross-pressured voters, or very few of them.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: Where sometimes I vote Republican, sometimes I vote Democrat on issues, but now it is just like what my party is is how I'm gonna vote up and down the ticket.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not voting Republican for governor and Democratic for president.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: It is what is the president and then all the way down the ballot.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: It is just sorted ourselves, which creates again a sorted uh uh a lawmaking class in a way that just simply was not true before.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: So basically the parties have boiled down to being a label for a whole constellation of issues.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: Proxies.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what how how come, for example, somebody who is for gun control is also going to be uh for uh uh the you know abortion rights and for doing something to protect the seals from climate change and the polar bears?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And how how come you get this sorting where there's a kind of comprehensive prediction that if you're a Democrat, you're gonna be for this, against that, and and on the Republican side, sort of the inverse.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a self-reinforcing phenomenon.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: And what scholars of of uh identity politics will tell you is that where party labels used to tell you something about you, now they are the party labels themselves are identity deep, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: That we can know something about a person's politics and then be able to make a ton of different assumptions, sometimes wrong, but oftentimes right, about uh everything from how much they make to what religion there are, to their demographics, things that are just bone marrow deep in us, they have also sorted along party lines as well.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is a campaign phenomenon, this is a media phenomenon, and then there's just a sociological factor in that we want to be a part of our own teams, right?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas before we were able politics was just what but one identifier for us.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Now it is a proxy for almost everything that we believe, obviously with some exceptions.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: I hate to paint in such broad brushes, but this is how campaigns see it.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: They call it the rule of five.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: If they know five things about you, they're able to predict who you voted for and how much you care about it.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you you often hear people talk about I'm a uh a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's fine, but when you get in the voting booth, you're gonna vote like one or the other, right?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like you don't get to kind of half shade in your box saying this is how much I agree with Democrats and half I agree with Republicans.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: You are forced in a binary choice.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: And more and more, despite seeing huge levels of independence, their myths of independence is well established.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: That they show up to vote.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: They usually vote for one party over and over and over, despite telling themselves that they are willing to be free agents.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: They're just not.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And this just uh ends up being another cycle of what you did last year will be exacerbated by an environment that is incentivized to pit you in one group or another, because that is the binary choice once we get into the ballot booth that we have to make.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you're telling kind of a dark story here.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: I yeah, I get that.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Despite being an optimist myself, yeah.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and what I see as being a little bit dark about the story is that you know it's not just politics and competing.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Over different priorities.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's really getting to be an existential competition, that your identity, your core values, are fundamentally threatened by the positions of the other side.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how many people are seeing political contestation these days.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when you spoke to my class of colonels, what two months ago, you talked about the worrisome tendency or the trend of moving toward dehumanizing language.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you say that when we're looking at democratic backsliding in many countries and perhaps even in the United States, uh, one of the signs that you start to see is people simply not looking at the other side as human, but rather as a threat to your very existence.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Say a little bit more about that.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you want me to I thought I was we're gonna turn optimist here.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: You want to get even darker here.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is the thing, Casey.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: We got a second episode coming up.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the light is.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Give everybody the light next time around.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's always darkest before the dawn of episode two.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: That is brilliant.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's good.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: But you're right, and this has been studied as well, in that we are not the first democracy that has faced polarized challenges, right?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, we've had polarized eras before, but this one's different for folks who study this for the reasons you bring up.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: That one of the fundamental signs of failing democracies and backsliding is what is called mutual intoleration, right?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: So that in a healthy democracy, you win sometimes, you lose sometimes, but you trust the process, and mostly you see the other side as worthy to be a part of the conversation.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: You may fundamentally disagree with them.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, there's strength in that disagreement.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: But if you don't have the votes, if someone else has uh uh more uh participation than you do, you recognize that you lost this round.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the minute that you start to see the other side as not only as a threat to your way of life, but you start dehumanizing them in your language, or even worse, and just how you see them without even vocalizing it, as unworthy of being a part of the process at all.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then you start seeing that reflected in campaigns.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: You start seeing that reflected that, and this is where the alarm bells should be ringing red, red, red hot, or I guess loud if you're talking about alarm bells, is when you start seeing members who are elected not only on this purpose, but then they use this type of language inside the offices they hold, where they're supposed to represent all of us, right?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: Especially at the presidential level.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: If from their office they're using their positions of power and their bully pulpits to dehumanize the other side, to the point of calling them unpatriotic or scum or infested or dangerous or traitors, like these are these are tried and true mantras of failed democracy.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the problem that you have about failed democracy is it's really hard to see it as it's happening day to day.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: But when you look back, you look back at failed democracy like, no duh, this was coming.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Why didn't they do something about it?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: Their leaders were thinking that half of the population were true traitors.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: That your democracy failed at that point.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: It is really hard to see in the moment, uh, but retroactively, it is often one you shake your head at and be like, that can't happen here.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: But the history of the world says it can, and these are often on fine edges.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I often think about democracy is that it's not an end, it's a means.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a means to the end of protecting the dignity of the losers as well as the winners.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: So so democracy is not just about making sure that the winners win, it's about making sure that the losers are protected.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's what gives the losers the faith, the faith that they can accept their loss and come back and compete again in the next election cycle.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like what you're saying is that as we turn to this really existential dehumanizing language of struggle, it makes it very, very difficult to sustain a vibrant democracy.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Especially if you use that as a means to change the system itself, right?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you use the system to get elected in the system to then change it because of the threat of some outside dangerous, unpatriotic force, then you're not talking about a democracy anymore.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: This is when you start seeing things like takeovers of elections, clamping down on the free media environment, uh the unpeaceful transfers of power.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: These are things that have registered throughout history as signs of failed democracies.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of folks are looking at the US being like, check, check, check.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Like we see all these things right now, which is why a lot of these democratic backsliding scholars will say, hey, we're not at threat anymore.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: We are actually in the process of, and we are, if we're not already too late, we are very close to turning this ship around.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: So the the the darkness is getting even darker here in our combo.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks, Casey Bergett.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's great talking with you.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: As I promised our listeners, we are going to come back in part two of the episode and uh and talk a little bit how we move back to the to the light side uh in our upcoming episode of the America's Why Podcast.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for your time.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the America's Why Podcast.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Our music is by James Fernando.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: For more information and to join the conversation, please visit our website at America's Why Project.com.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: See you next week.