Tonight, Kamala Harris shoots her "bank shot" to save democracy
Tonight, Kamala Harris shoots her "bank shot" to save democracy
How do you talk about the threat of fascism while also connecting to more immediate voter concerns? A primer
It’s closing argument time, and as Trump and his proxies have doubled down on the very worst of their fascist tendencies, Kamala Harris is set to make a very different kind of appeal to voters tonight. She is reportedly planning to talk not about democracy in the abstract, but about how and why a democratic future means one in which Americans have the freedom to live their lives and achieve their goals.
In staging the event on the Ellipse (where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021, at the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol), Harris is doing something we’d talked about just a few days ago with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio: inviting voters into a bigger conversation about what her presidency will mean in real terms, and doing it in a way that recognizes the gravity of the moment. As Shenker-Osorio put it then,
She needs to open an honest conversation with Americans that creates a clear differentiation between her and him and a clear differentiation between these two vastly different futures. She does it in an extraordinary historic place like the Mall, hearkening to the Women's March and the March on Washington, surrounded by an unexpected group of people.
But Harris is also doing something we talked about earlier this year with political scientist Daniel Ziblatt, a leading expert in how democracies around the world have responded to challenges from antidemocratic forces.
That conversation focused on why a vigorous pro-democracy movement hasn’t emerged to compete with Trumpism, and why so much of the argument against MAGA has leaned too heavily on abstract calls to “defend democracy,” or has felt like business-as-usual politics — wholly inadequate to the moment either way.
What Ziblatt told us is that, by and large, Democrats haven’t been able to make the case for democratic reform because they haven’t been able to address the more immediate problems people face. To do that, they need to link the case for democracy to the way people can succeed in the economy, to the way they can exercise reproductive freedom, to their ability to care for kids or parents.
That’s what Ziblatt calls the bank shot to save democracy. And that’s the kind of shot Kamala Harris needs to put up tonight.
Below, we invite you to read the full text of our conversation with Daniel Ziblatt.
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When a democracy is at risk of dying, what does a movement to save its life look like? Do we have a pro-democracy movement resembling that in the United States today?
We have to think both short-term and long-term. There's the next 11 months, and then there's the long-term challenge.
Doing this emergency work of staving off the worst nightmare in the short run is necessary. That work is taking a defensive posture of how to preserve what we have. That involves having a broad coalition of people from the left to the right who all, despite all their differences, agree on a commitment to constitutional democracy.
And that's hard to do. I don't want to understate that. But in terms of the long term: I think we'll continue to be in this crisis each election, every four years, if not every two years, unless we begin to transform the institutions that I think are giving rise to this crisis.
In the last chapter of our book, Tyranny of the Minority, we do a deeper dive to find where the institutions have gone wrong and what can be done to address that. And so, we propose a set of reforms that are really difficult to achieve — institutional reforms, getting rid of the Electoral College, weakening the filibuster, making it easier to vote, term limits for judges. We have 15 proposals.
I see an imbalance between the professed level of outrage by very large numbers of people about Trump, about Trumpism, about democratic decay, about lies, and the lack of an actual movement. Can you talk about that imbalance?
There's a book by Eitan Hersh called Politics is for Power. He makes this case about how to move beyond what he calls political hobbyism: people watching MSNBC and feeling like they're engaged in politics. This is like the community I live in, a place where when you go take your dog for a walk at night, you see everybody's TVs are on and they’re watching MSNBC, but voter turnout for local elections is 15 percent. And so that's really a problem that afflicts both red states and blue states.
Institutional change is something that not everybody cares about. Or it's like a bank shot to get to what you want; it's an indirect route. If you're not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms?
The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives. Whether that's abortion rights or gun control; it could be economic policy.
I also think there's something to be drawn from looking at America's own great tradition of institutional reform. Up until about 1970, there was a tradition of reforming the Constitution and making our system more democratic. We’ve stopped doing that, and reimagining what’s possible is really important.
It seems like authoritarians perfectly understand the actual emotional landscape of the country and of people. And generally pro-democratic leaders don't. Can you talk about that?
We say emotion, but what's that mean? It means fear, it means hope, it means aspiration, anxiety. It’s this fear, fear of loss. This idea that if you have been at the top of the hierarchy, equalization feels like you're now at the bottom of the hierarchy — that, I think, is a lot of what's driving our politics, particularly on the Republican side of things.
I would say the hypothesis of the Biden presidency was that if you address people's material concerns, this will take some of the steam and anger out of the populist movement — this rage that fuels Trump and continues to fuel MAGA. And I think there's a lot to that. It's a pretty good bet to make.
But if you look at the persistent low poll numbers and the perception of the economy — I think this is something that people haven't really dealt with: why are people still not happy? — maybe there's something else that's going on. And I think it does have to do with these broader demographic and cultural changes that people are responding to, and not really understanding.
And so I don't quite know what political leader out there is doing this. I think Biden tries to speak to it to some degree. I think he thinks of himself as being able to do that. He does it better than lots of politicians, but it's still probably not sufficient.
Is it just easier for authoritarians to play to emotions? Or is that just a cop-out for not being that good at politics?
It reminds me of when professors are really dry lecturers and they say, "Well, I could be demagoguing it and be really popular, but then I wouldn't be as rigorous." But this sense that there's a trade-off between being serious and connecting with people is a cop-out for people who are just not able to do that.
It feels like it is a common cop-out among pro-democratic forces.
Let's take the German Social Democrats. Now today Olaf Scholz is not somebody who gets people's passions going. He's a technocrat, and that's how he sells himself. But if you think of the origins of the German Social Democratic Party, they were excluded, had no access to free press. People were being arrested. Willy Brandt, the first post-war German Social Democrat, was able to appeal to people as an outsider on this very emotional level — it was 1969, so it was a particular moment, and though he was older, he tapped into people's sense of what is possible.
When you're an outsider, what you have on your side is your outsider status and your ability to tap into people's sense of being left out.
And I think this is a vulnerability of all of the calls for defending democracy or our constitutional system. For people who are dissatisfied with the political system, what is it we're trying to protect? What is it we're trying to defend and preserve? And that's a pretty weak appeal.
What we need is to present a vision of what kind of democracy, what kind of society we want — something that can tap into people's hopes and aspirations.
In Tyranny of the Minority, you describe this scene from Spain, in 1981, where there's a coup attempt, and you see people coming together across the political spectrum to stop it. Why does that seem so impossible to imagine in the US today?
The good news about democracies worldwide is that everywhere majorities tend to be pretty democratic in their principles. There’s also this ethnonationalist minority everywhere, but what's unique about the U.S. is that they have this outsized influence. So the question is, how do you stitch this broad coalition together, especially before the next election?
Instead of the campaign speech Biden just gave on Friday [President Biden’s speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania on January 5, 2024, which focused on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy], I’d like to have seen a speech given to commemorate January 6th, with Liz Cheney sitting right next to A.O.C., with Dick Cheney in the audience. This shouldn't be a partisan event. This needs to be a moment of national recognition and consensus, like Spain in 1981.
So why isn't that happening? Immediately after January 6th was, potentially, one of those moments. Had there been a broad national consensus in the way people talked about what just happened, public opinion would've gone a different way, and then it would've been easier today for politicians on the right to get on board with this.
But that moment passed, and to now be a Republican and just to come out and condemn January 6th, you're going to face the wrath of your voters. And so somebody like Elise Stefanik is playing this nasty, cynical politics with this, because this is where she thinks the voters are. And she's right, in some sense; she’s playing understandable politics. But once the history becomes bifurcated, it's very hard to stitch it back together.
I think your bank shot point is really important. The people who are engaged in trying to craft communications to voters are saying “Democracy is under a threat, imperiled, this could be the last election ever…but I know you're really concerned about the price of bananas.” How can they clarify the links between everyday issues and the need for making our politics more democratic?
Certain issues lend themselves to that argument — for example, when you have overwhelming majorities and polls supporting gun control, and yet absence of any reform, then it's much easier to try to make the case for why you need a whole set of institutional reforms, let's say bigger election districts for Congress, or eliminating the Senate filibuster. So you’re not foregrounding the argument for institutional reform, you’re foregrounding the policy issue and saying the way to get what you want is to carry out this reform.
The way to make these links is to find the issues where there's this disjuncture between majority and minority rule, because majority rule is such a compelling argument that everybody gets. You're out to dinner with your family on a Friday night. We're going to have Chinese food or go out for sushi. You vote, everybody knows the majority should get its way.So you address what people really need and in the process reform our institutions, which then has the effect of bolstering our democracy. That’s the formula I have in my mind.
What haunts me that right now, though, is that if you were to poll 100,000 people — and polls don't have the Electoral Colleges or filibusters — about whether they prefer an authoritarian, maybe even fascistic offering on one side or a pro-democratic one on the other, it’s neck and neck.
Even with institutional reform to limit the effect of an anti-democratic movement with support from maybe 35 percent of people taking power, we have a big problem if even 35 percent of Americans are attracted to these ideas. How do you think about that?
If you look across the world, the AFD's support in Germany is around 20 percent. On its best day, it may gain up to 30 percent. The Sweden Democrats get 30 percent. Geert Wilders' party gets around 30 percent. In West European and American societies, there is this consistent level of support for these ideas, and the higher the number gets, the more dangerous it is. And so, as a very practical, pragmatic way of thinking about this, how do we limit the damage of that 35 percent?
The European democracies have done a better job at containing that 35 percent. None of these parties have ever been in power without being in a coalition. But even the European model of dealing with this by containment is a short-term model, because it doesn't confront the underlying problem, and it also reinforces the narrative that the insiders are keeping out the outsiders, which is the argument that's fueling a lot of this anyway.
It is absolutely critical for people to study this, to understand what is behind that 35 percent. I think we shouldn't take it as a given that it’s just inherent to democratic societies, but we have to think about why there's this segment of the electorate that's going to be resisting dramatic cultural changes, how these groups can be dangerous, and diminish that.
I'm becoming more and more convinced of something that maybe has been obvious all along, which is that as a society, we're facing this barrage of propaganda, whether through social media or Fox News, and we just have to figure out how to combat this wave of misinformation, limit the impact of that on our national institutions.
You were talking about walking the dog, and seeing all of the TVs tuned to MSNBC. I probably haven’t gotten a bigger reaction in years than when I recently talked about the lack of a pro-democracy movement on MSNBC. I got all these emails from people asking, "Where is this movement? I want to be in it. Can you connect me to something?" What can they do? How can they start?
So you're passing along their questions to me…
I'm forwarding the emails to you.
First of all, you have to get involved with real organizations, where people are coming together face to face. This can mean volunteering at your local precinct office of the Democratic Party. It turns out it's a really low bar to get involved. You could very quickly become the leader of the local precinct office. And then you notice that nobody can meet regularly because they all have kids. So you work to set up a thing where people are sharing childcare duties, and next everyone is thinking about who should be the candidate in the next election.
That argues for not actually making everything about Trump?
You need to think about these local issues. Some of this stuff can be very parochial: should there be leash rules in the local park, speaking of walking your dog…
Talk about polarizing issues.
It’s people finding the issues they care about, where they’re living their lives, and being engaged. And there's a whole set of organizations that have emerged, in an unintended positive effect of the Trump era — Protect Democracy in Washington, D.C. for example. They file lawsuits, they issue papers on institutional reforms, and write about institutional reforms that matter even in your local community. Like, should your local community introduce ranked-choice voting?
I recently brought a group of students to a town hall meeting in Lexington, Massachusetts, where they're voting on whether or not to introduce ranked order voting. And some of the defenders of the status quo said, "Well, I understand the national symbolism of this, but what's wrong in Lexington that really needs this reform?" Which I thought was a very good question to ask. And so people tried to make the case, "Well, if you look at who's running for office, it's all the same people over and over. Maybe if we did this, we'd have different people." So, people are engaged at the local level. And they're downloading white papers from Protect Democracy, and understanding the importance of these institutional reforms, and they can then become engaged on that level too.
That's my best answer: being engaged through real organizations, whether in local electoral politics, unions, church and religious institutions, that are addressing the real concerns of people's everyday lives.
Last question. Is there a case you'd make for hope? Is there anything in the United States that gives you hope that the authoritarian threat will be overcome?
There are overwhelming majorities of Americans who do value these institutions and value liberal principles, and value principles of racial equality. I was looking at some survey data on whether or not you think there should be rules, restrictions on where people can live on the basis of race. In the mid-1970s, very high percentages of Americans agreed that there should be. Today, overwhelming percentages of Americans think the opposite, conservative and liberal alike.
On a whole series of questions like this, there's been a major transformation in people's views about race and racial equality. And as much as we have this moment of Nazis in the streets and racists feeling like it's possible to talk more vocally, if you look at the numbers, most Americans reject this stuff. If you think of Richard Nixon's effort to inflame the silent majority in the late 60s and early 70s, it was incredibly successful. Donald Trump's attempt to do that in 2020 just foundered. And I think it's because there have been profound changes in most Americans’ basic attitudes.
There are serious ailments — guns, violence, etc. — but our society at some level has this vibrancy, this health, and our economy is pretty strong as well, though our institutions just don't reflect that. And so that's why I'm obsessed with the institutions. I feel like, if we could get our politics right, then it could reflect that more. That's where I find hope and optimism.
Daniel Ziblatt’s most recent book (with Steven Levitsky) is Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
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Many of the institutions are run be rich powerful profit seekers! Take Amazon dictator for one.
After watching Michelle‘s speech, I think that she should’ve been the candidate. I think the bar for women is so incredibly higher than for men that should be wake up call for everybody that thinks that equality has been achieved. We still live in a patriarchy.