Trust me?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good day. I say good day because it's late morning for me. It's approaching the dinner hour for you in the UK, right?

Chris Hey, Scott. Yeah, it is. The day has just poof. It was like poof, and it was lunchtime, and now poof, and it's late in the afternoon on a Friday. What better way to end the week? Exactly. It's been a big week.

Scott Yeah, this is so we're in different times. When is tea time? Do you do tea time? Yeah, tea time is sort of mid-afternoon. I would love that. I would love if people just were like, tea today, let's go have tea. That sounds like a nice way to break up the afternoon.

Chris Afternoon tea. Are you an afternoon tea fan? I mean, you know, high afternoon tea includes champagne, but ordinary afternoon tea, it begins with savory, so like little finger sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches, that kind of thing. And then it moves into sweet, where you have the scones with clotted cream and jam and other... That sounds fantastic. Little cakes. Have you never done this? No, never. Not once, not once. So, I mean, next time you are in my part of the world here... We're going to go for afternoon tea.

Scott I would love it.

Chris High tea with champagne. The way to do it right is we go to one of the grand hotels in London, like the Savoy or the Mandarin Oriental or the Dorchester, and they all do afternoon tea. And it's ridiculously expensive and impossibly pretentious, but it is also as many finger sandwiches as you can eat, and it's really, really good.

Scott Do you think the queen does afternoon tea pretty much every day?

Chris She could never maintain that svelte waistline if she did that.

Scott She's never going to die. Charles must be like, look, I love you, but I mean, gosh, I want my shot. She's never going to die. I mean, she has so much energy.

Chris I mean, the English probably did find the fountain of youth on their... During their colonial history, and they transported the Buckingham Palace, and she probably sips from it on a daily basis. Yeah, because she is... And so death for her is kind of an optional thing when she's decided that she's done it.

Scott Yeah, and Philip, too. I mean, he looks like he's kicking it. He looks vibrant. For his age, I mean, he doesn't look... Well, Donald Trump, of course, is the youngest... I was defending the people, defending General Lee, and I talked to some generals, and they all said, they all considered General Lee. And everybody just pretends that that conversation happened. Like, oh, okay, he just said he pulled the generals. You know, that's what he does. Walks in the situation room. I know we got a problem in Syria, but first, where are we at with General Lee? Robert E. Lee. Aside from the fact that General Lee was not a great person and was not a great general. Gettysburg kind of gambled a lot. I mean, yeah, I don't know. But that's the country I live in now, where you can just say whatever you want.

Chris There is something that we are living through, and I guess to you and me, men of a certain age, it still strikes us as jarring that there is no more kind of arbiter of, I don't want to say truth, but a kind of, you know, there's just no more gatekeeper. on what can be said and what just can't be said because you would be shut down or ridiculed for saying it. And this kind of unhingedness from the norms of the past, it's... I mean, I know this is all stuff that we've tread over before, but it does seem that there is still this kind of difficulty to catch up with... What's the adjective I'm looking for? It's not impetuous, but not audacity with which it's possible to just say anything.

Scott Yeah, I mean, there's a cavalierness to it all.

Chris Cavalierness, maybe that's a good word. And there's a casual relationship with the truth. Okay, we're going to add this to our pre-show notes. We're going to have to come up with another new recurring segment, which is, I don't know what we'll call it, whatever listeners can tell us, but when you find the exact appropriate English word for something.

Scott By the way, following up on Dungeons & Dragons, the Cavalier is a class. In the advanced expansion, it's a new class, the Cavalier.

Chris Are you still playing D&D?

Scott No, but I just have a great memory.

Chris Oh, dear God.

Scott I researched last week, too, after our conversation. I researched how you could play it online and stuff. I was into it. Our conversation kind of got me jazzed.

Chris It's interesting. I mean, so this is digressing into a deep dark hole, but I do think that whatever corporation Like, owned the rights to Dungeons and Dragons and would publish the materials to people who played it required. Like, you needed a Dungeon Master's Guide, and that was a quite expensive book. And you needed, like, a player's handbook that listed the different spells that you could cast and, you know, what the different armor classes were and all the different character classes. And that cost some money.

Scott Deities and Demigods. Remember that one book, Deities and Demigods, that gave the... The statistics for Hercules and Thor and all this.

Chris I never had that one, but there was a series of monsters compendiums that gave you all the statistics of the different monsters. And I had the expansion pack for the outer planes, and that was all of the avatars and the rare dragon classes like the... You know, I forget what they were, like the Celestial Dragon and, you know, the different demons from the Abyss.

Scott World of Warcraft.

Chris Like, oh my goodness, like all the hit points that these things had.

Scott World of Warcraft could fill this void. I might reopen my World of Warcraft account because it does kind of simulate.

Chris No, I was going to say, I was going to say, so I think that the company that used to publish all that stuff, I think they either like went bankrupt or they must, I think they might have sold the rights off. Because there was this period where I think it just kind of fizzled and everyone was going to Nintendo. Yeah, and now it's back. And now it's back. And I think, unfortunately, probably, you know, it sucks for the people who developed all this stuff that they probably couldn't last long enough for the kind of Game of Thrones phenomenon and for all this online multiplayer stuff.

Scott Gary Gygax was the guy who invented it, right?

Chris He passed away a long time ago, or not that long ago, but I remember there was an obituary about him in The Economist, I think, a few years back.

Scott Boy, we're really off track now. Dungeons and Dragons and The Economist. That means somebody at The Economist played Dungeons and Dragons.

Chris Well, so interesting. Do you think there is a relationship between what's going on in, let's say, reality, whatever that is, and what our appetite for entertainment is?

Scott This was kind of our topic last week. Sort of. Did we talk about this last week? Didn't we talk about expectations for Game of Thrones and how people have lots of criticisms even of great episodes and yet we are so relatively passive and we have low expectations of our public life and democracy that all of our high expectations are not in our shared life together but they're in entertainment because that's where really our energies are focused.

Chris Right, but going then one layer deeper, what entertainment satisfies us? I wonder, does that depend or is that, you know, what's the relationship between the entertainment that satisfies us and what's going on, you know, kind of in reality, in the political culture, in the social culture, economically? I mean, so I think I can just think of a couple data points, for example. So one is this question, like, is there more of an attraction to fantastic entertainment? Thank you. That, you know, it was maybe like 10 or 15 years ago where the fantasy that appealed was, you know, like the vampire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was like the highest form of the undead and they had like these beautiful creatures that couldn't die and they had the super intelligence and all this kind of stuff. And then, you know, fast forward 10 or 15 years and it became the zombie, which is kind of the lowest form of undead. It's mindless. It's stupid. All it has is this unthinking hunger. It's ugly. Yeah.

And is that just, you know, fashion? Or is the fashion of our entertainment, in fact, informed in some deep way by what we have a hunger to see? I think that one thing— Or what we need to escape from.

Scott Maybe, I think it might be related, but I think in times of scarcity, our fantasy is abundance. And in times of relative abundance, our fantasy is scarcity. So like, we've lived in the West in a time of relative prosperity since the economic— Crisis at the end of the, it was like around 2007, right? 2008. Since then, you know, there's been a relative abundance and so many of our fantasies are post-apocalyptic scarcity, right? What happens when it all gets pulled away, like The Walking Dead or Battlestar Galactica or Revolutions, all these things. So I think that then when we have anxiety about scarcity, we fantasize about abundance and things like that.

Chris So that's interesting. And not that we need to go directly into politics, but the first thought I had in reaction to that is, you know, you think about the US 2020 elections then. Does that kind of analysis that sort of we fantasize for the opposite, does that help us to think about, you know, who... Who could be the Democratic nominee that, you know, best sort of captures the fantasies of... Well, fantasize about boring and normal.

Scott Mitt Romney should become a Democrat. This is his time. This is the Mormon time. Yeah, maybe. Not that there aren't Democratic Mormons. I mean, Harry Reid was a Mormon, is a Mormon, former Senate Majority Leader, but there are several prominent Democrats, but most of them tend to be these days Republican.

Chris So let's get a bit rooted in the ground here.

Scott What in the last week has really been... Well, we talked yesterday about some things that... Well, you told me that there was a poll that said that when you look at... Oh yeah, let me tell you this. Was it Western people in institutions?

Chris So I think this is really good research, and I'm going to give a plug for the Edelman Trust, E-D-E-L-M-A-N, does really great research. And one of the things that they have is what they call the Trust Barometer. And every year they go around the world and they ask people in their country, how much do you trust public institutions in your country? And last year, really interesting, I mean, right near the bottom of the list are the UK, the US. There are countries that even score lower, but we're talking about 40%, 35 to 40% of people trust public institutions in their country.

Scott 45 to 50?

Chris No, more like 35 to 40. Oh, 35 to 40.

Scott I was going to say 50, it seems like.

Chris And most of the advanced liberal democracies are underwater on this score. There are a couple that aren't. I think Canada is around that midpoint. I think that New Zealand is somewhere in the positive 50s. But if you want to look at the countries, well, what do you think? Where would you think are the countries that are going to score high on that question, on that survey, when they ask people?

Scott Trust in public institutions. Canada, I would have said, was high. I would guess the Russian Federation is low. I would think, you know, I mean, this is interesting because totalitarian, you wonder like, I mean, my instinct is to think that authoritarian means you'd have low trust. How do we, yeah, this is, so, okay, so low is the UK and the US. So what would high be? I mean, is it like Scandinavia? Because they seem pretty happy.

Chris They seem pretty happy. Keep talking for 10 seconds. I'm looking at 29. Denmark, Norway, Fjords, Sweden.

Scott Switzerland, I think, would be lower than Scandinavia.

Chris I'm looking at... Okay, I got to upgrade to fiber or something. You do.

Scott You need to. Is it expensive in England?

Chris Well, it's interesting. I don't know. What would it cost you to get fiber to the home where you are in the US?

Scott With the cable TV package and everything, probably like $190 something a month. That's like cable fiber at high speed. I think it's like the highest speed from Comcast. I'm thinking not fiber, but the cable that's the equivalent of fiber. You either go with the phone fiber or the cable-lined fiber. We use the cable-lined fiber. So tell me what the highest is. Okay. I'll tell you what. I'll tell you the highest internet speeds are Korea, not England.

Chris So you're right about the bottom, which is Russia. The UK is down there. Oh, wow. So the US, this is interesting. From 2018 to 2019, US trust has actually gone up about six or seven points.

Scott We're making America great again over here.

Chris Yeah, that's right, to 49%. Canada is up at 56% this year. China was at the top last year and is at the top again, but even higher, 79%. China is 79%. Leads the world, 79%. And it changes a bit when you look at – so they divide the general public. General population and the informed public, which I think is people probably with a university degree. And for the informed public in China, again, leads the world and is the highest. 88% of informed public in China trust... That's astounding. Yeah, that is pretty astounding. In the US, 60%.

Scott If you are well-educated in China, you think the governing apparatus, which is fair to say, relatively autocratic, there's high trust there. That fascinates me. So I think then it becomes...

Chris Does that surprise you? Because if you think about trusting public institutions in terms of taking care of business, in terms of... Giving us what we need. You know, maybe one would think, well, I mean, democracy is just so messy, right? We spend so much time debating over where, you know, where we should go. Whereas, you know, an authoritarian state can sort of shortchange that. I actually, you know, but I mean, I think that's kind of like a surface level analysis. I think that the deeper analysis to take away from that is how important different institutions in society really are. And, you know, there are so many institutions within the liberal democratic world. I think that in our ideology, our self-governing, the media, the academy, the courts, for example, But that in leaving them to be self-governing, they're susceptible to being corrupted by a number of other sectors in society, right? Whether it's government or whether it's the rich or whether it's corporations or what have you. And so, you know, maybe that contributes to a sense of distrust in my institutions that I'm not really sure if they are self-governing in the way that they are expected to be. Versus, I mean, in China, none of these institutions are self-governing, right? They are all invested by the state and they're kind of, you know, well invested by the state because the state really gets that. Inculcating certain perspectives through the public and higher education system, inculcating certain perspectives through the media, through the private sector, are all really important to aligning society to sort of a single political program, that they do seem to perform that role quite coherently and quite well.

Maybe that's it, that part of what we're seeing here is the kind of, you know, the coherence of the system. Whereas you look across, you know, look across Europe, look across North America, there is so much kind of, you know, failing faith in the public system and instead people taking change into their own hands, right? Like whether it's this Yellow Vest movement here in Europe, and I know it's in Canada as well, you know,

Scott The Yellow Vest Movement is the populist movement no one likes. It's this people's movement that no one gets behind.

Chris But it's only one example, right? There's this Extinction Rebellion that's making very significant waves here in Europe. I don't know if it's such a big movement within the US, is it? Do you have students who are walking out of schools on Fridays to protest against ineffective action on climate change by political and corporate leaders? No. No. No. It's happening on a pretty big scale in Europe right now. I don't think we have any of that. It expresses a kind of just complete loss of faith that, you know, the formal leadership layers in society are taking some of the big signals about what matters to the well-being of the, you know, of those who lack political representation seriously at all. And I think, you know, and this is all... We will eventually figure out how this all connects. But I think it also relates to what we were talking about earlier with the kind of the cavalierness, to borrow your language, with which, say, Donald Trump can kind of say whatever he wants to hear about himself.

In public, that, you know, many people have become, you know, far less engaged with the news or even the concept of the news, right? That there is a kind of, you know, a well-curated set of events that we should understand each day. And instead has abandoned that for, well, this perspective makes sense to me because I don't really believe in the capacity or the integrity of anyone to curate what should inform me on my behalf.

Scott Yeah, so I think this is interesting. I'm thinking about de Tocqueville and Democracy in America, right? Early 19th century book. Many people say the best book on American democracy in the sense of it. I mean, you could point to lots of details that he maybe doesn't get quite right or misunderstands because of language barriers. As a Frenchman and things like that. But generally, understanding how democracies work and their pathologies and things like that, it's still widely read. And he thinks, makes this observation, equality and liberty don't always necessarily go together, right?

Chris So you... Hold on, hold on, hold on. Equality and liberty don't always go together. Okay. Right.

Scott He's a guy that... I think he can trace his origins back to, like, William the Conqueror or something, right? And his family makes it through the French Revolution, even though they're of an aristocratic class. And he sees, like, in the French Revolution, there's liberty established, right? There's the despotism and things are overturned. And yet, then there's this increase in equality, the citizen... Equality, but yet it becomes despotic and tyrannical in a different way, right? And then you see Napoleon come in and restores equality under the law, but then is, again, appoints himself sort of emperor, and you have these tensions between liberty and equality. And he thought that one of the dangers in America is he thought that Americans will always favor the latter over the former, that they'll choose equality over liberty. But then he thought that there are things that he thought that you could have a tyranny of the majority, right, like public opinion. So he observed somewhere that, you know, in the north, a white man could marry a black woman, but he wouldn't because of public opinion. Like, they just won't do it because of the tyranny of public opinion. He says Americans argue, argue, argue until a majority is taking place. Then they kind of silence dissent at times, he thought. But this is a kind of question because you have these twin values, liberty and equality, ideally in a modern democracy. So what China can probably promise is high on equality and low on liberty. You have an autocratic system that can deliver because it doesn't have to deal with elections and things like this that are surprising in any event.

I mean, the party has a sort of long-term vision for control and things like that. And so you can promise relative equality, right, at the cost of liberty. And that's an interesting thing that you, although you could argue in an American context, we might be... De Tocqueville thought there were some interesting things in American life that helped preserve the balance. He thought, for instance, that religion was a help because it didn't just undergird the majority as it did in Europe, but there were competing religious visions and things, and there was a morality without a sort of conscription of the majority and association, like civil society. He thought that all these associations that Americans participated in That they learned democratic values in those, right? That the civic society was... But as you see, like, I think in Western democracies, these sort of civic spheres decay a little bit and our public life get more corrosive. Maybe that reflects, you know, the lack of trust we have in institutions and things like that. I don't know.

Chris Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of... It would be great if we could kind of resurrect de Tocqueville today and have a conversation with him about where the world is at now. And, you know, have a conversation with his ideas because, you know, I think the part that I remember most clearly from, you know, when I read Democracy in America was his stuff about civil society and kind of just ranting on, like, these people... They get together and they weigh in politically on like everything. Like it's crazy. And I think where he was coming from was a much more aristocratic Europe where, you know, there was still kind of an idea that, you know, the aristocracy runs the country. And yeah, it's a democracy, but, you know, there's an elevated class that, you know, decides things. And then there's sort of the rest of us or the rest of people who kind of go along with it. And then he comes to America. It's like, whoa. Everybody is kind of, you know, taking part in the life of their community.

Scott Yeah, one of the things in the 19th century that would freak out diplomats from Europe when they come to this new country is they couldn't figure out who their class was because everybody in America dressed the same, right? Like, you can figure out, well, this person's dressed this way so that I know what class they are. And you come over here and like, well, everybody wears similar clothes. Like, we don't have uniforms over here. What's the deal?

Chris But then if we had him alive today, we'd kind of shop him around the world and show him some of the data on trust in democracy. I wonder how his thinking would evolve. So I'm looking at this data now. So one of the questions they ask is trust in NGOs, which is an imperfect proxy, but it's kind of a proxy for civil society. Would you agree?

Scott Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, I think people get into non-government, like, you know, the United Way or the, or, you know, the people, you know, I just did a 5K race for this Woods School, which is a school that, it's amazing, it's kind of, it's right around the corner from my house, but they, you know, for disabled people... Severely disabled children and adults. And, you know, people in America have all these causes, right? And non-governmental organizations, charitable organizations. I mean, that's a kind of association, right? People raise money for it. They do 5Ks. They do all this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, that's probably a proxy.

Chris Okay, so China, again, scores number one in the world. 74% trust NGOs. US, 52%, so just over half. And so is that an expression of liberty, participating in an NGO? I guess, well, it's – see, I don't know exactly what point I want to make yet, but I'm – Your comparison of equality and liberty has me careening back to the years that I did my fieldwork for my doctorate in China. And that was all about talking to people about their political values. And when I wanted to kind of both signal to my opposite from across the interview table that I was willing to explore beyond my own boundaries of ideology, And I wanted to have a kind of, you know, let's have a cool, deep conversation about stuff. I would often throw on the table the question, you know, what is liberty? And, you know, depending what their poison was, they would often kind of, you know, sit back, take a drag on their cigarette, you know, take a swig of their liquor, whatever they were drinking, and give me that kind of, you know, yeah, man, that's deep sort of look, right?

Because, you know, for a lot of, I think, Chinese who responded positively to all sorts of things in this survey about trust in government, you know, it's not at all clear. Or they would want to, they would need a lot of explanation about how... You know, the ritual of casting a vote is connected to liberty and would need even a lot more explanation that, like, it's the fundamental part of liberty.

Scott And even casting a vote would be only part... I mean, de Tocqueville looks at America and thinks, you know, traditionally republics... And one of his fears was that that couldn't hold together a Republican ideal because it's too self-interested. There's not a high enough civic virtue. Now, well, China, I mean, I guess you could say... Hey, we're in it together. We're in it, you know, and maybe it's autocratic, but there's this thing, hey, we're one.

Chris Well, I think there's also, you know, I think maybe you've put your finger on it, is that maybe it's just clearer what the purpose of public institutions is in a country like China, where it's not just that we're one, but like we have work to do. Or at least we've been socialized, we've grown up in a narrative that we have work to do, that we are a country that used to be the big show in the world for centuries or even millennia, depending what history book you want to read. And in the 19th century, you know, as Europe was trying to carve up the world amongst themselves, we were humiliated, right? They came into this country, and they took over Shanghai, and they took over Qingdao, and they sacked Beijing, and they took away all of our fancy gold objects. We had to pay reparations, called the Boxer Rebellion, stuff like this. And so the 20th century and communism really put us behind the eight ball. And so especially the last sort of 40 years has been about catching up to the rich world because they've got all this stuff that we can't afford and they can do all these things like land on the moon that we can't do. So catching up to the rich world in order to undo and purge ourselves of that humiliation and ultimately get back to a position of global leadership. And it looks like these public institutions in our society are helping us to get there because, boy, you look in the rearview mirror and we're certainly closer to that goal. We're certainly more respected. We're taken more seriously. We have more weight and voice and people invite our leaders to...

The big global gatherings, and they want our involvement, and they want access to our markets. The tables have turned. And so we are making clear progress on what the public collective objective is. If I think of here in the UK, for example, where we decide, okay, we're going to break away from the European Union. I mean, one of the things that was strongly lacking, and this is now ancient history going back to 2016, but, you know, I was here during that sort of referendum, like the campaign leading up to it. And, you know, there just wasn't a very clear narrative for why. Like, why the European Union? Why this political project? What is it for? Most of the argument made for remaining was that this is going to be an economic catastrophe. This is going to be bad for you as an individual or for us as an economy.

But beyond that, there wasn't some kind of project that made it clear that this would be a step backwards if we went this way. And similarly, I think in the US, I mean, there's so much acrimony now. I mean, just sort of, I can feel it from over here on the other side of the ocean. Contempt.

Scott Contempt. There's a great... Arthur Brooks just wrote a book about this, about what's killing us is not division or argument. It's contempt. I mean, there's all this study of marital couples. That's where marriages break down. It's not fights. It's not infidelity. It's contempt for the partner.

Chris Right. Okay. So it's contempt now, but kind of so what that we are contemptuous toward one another? What is the shared project that we are harming, that we hold and throw this contempt at one another? And it seems like the answer is, I don't know, historical, or it's a kind of, you know, a manifest destiny that maybe no one really believes anymore. Because we kind of lost this narrative of the shiny city on a hill. But so, if there's no compelling reason to work together towards something, then, you know, fighting each other seems fine, as long as I win.

Scott Yeah, no, I think that's, well, a point well made. I think that, when you look at American life, the whole life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness... This idea that pursuit of happiness, I mean, I think the founders were thinking eudaimia, the Greek word of the good life. Not just pleasure, but the good life. And I don't think we have a shared, I don't even think we interpret it that way anymore. I think people... So it's, you know, when George H.W. Bush died, there was talk about how he came from a class where they're privileged and white and there was inequality. And yet there was also an expectation for men like him, people like him, and mostly men, right, males, that they had to do public service because of their privilege. There was this sort of thing that their privilege was not something to just be self-indulgent with, but they ought to give back, right?

And that is just sort of one view of the good life. But it's not as though... So, you know, this is interesting because we are and, you know, everyone younger than us is even more so.

Chris You know, we are kind of post-Cold War generations. And you know, during the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, maybe that was a big part of what kind of kept the disagreements on the healthy side of contempt. Which was, we are in this historic struggle against communism. And the future of the world is at stake. And for that reason, you know, we form these grand alliances. We don't exactly think the same, but we're aligned on this, NATO.

Scott Yeah, yeah, and think of before the Cold War, before the Cold War, the post-war. So you had the late 40s, 50s, before the Cold War, rebuilding, we've defeated totalitarian Nazis, totalitarian Axis versus the allies of democracy. And so there's this civic pride in the post-war generation. The veterans are coming back, and the GI Bill, and there's this robust sense of civic life and public life. And then the Cold War, you have another Yeah, I think that those things probably keep the contempt at a lower temperature.

Chris And so you wonder if, I mean, is this maybe part of what, I'm bouncing around again, but if you look at sort of what is fueling populism in liberal democratic world today, I mean is it that there is You know, in the absence of a clear enemy, there is this kind of void of like what mobilizes us. And so whether, you know, you point to, you know, immigrants coming in these hordes or, you know, radical Islamic terrorism. Or China, right? We got to catch up with them now. It taps some capacity within our sense of identity, within our sense of civics, to work toward the collective good of us.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting too, the populism that we're seeing in the United States and parts of Europe, it employs the tools of what was seen by the right as the sort of hard left. Things like identity politics, things like all truth is political, that sort of stuff. In the 80s, people were writing books about the danger of the left and relativism and all this. Now, the populism employs those tools. You've got white identity politics, grievance politics, right? You've got this idea, you know, the post-truth society, how all truth is political. The things that used to worry conservatives about, you know, quote-unquote post-modernity, the populists employ in the sort of acrimonious debate.

Chris It's strange. It's very strange. I missed everything that you just said. I'm sure it was eloquent. It was. I'm sure it was great. It was huge. It was something about populism.

Scott Well, yeah, no, I was just saying, it's interesting that the populism today in America and parts of Europe employs things that scared the hell out of conservatives in, say, the 80s, you know, that they saw as tools of the far left, the identity politics. All truth is political. I mean, Trump is the king of this. That contributes to the division, things that the right used to decry that now part of it, because most of the populism is, a lot of it's on some form of the right, not exclusively, but that now it's employed, what used to scare people on the right.

Chris So it's interesting, because remember you've now once or twice mentioned this Bill Clinton line. Democrats are there to remove the lines that shouldn't have been drawn and Republicans are there to draw the lines that shouldn't have been drawn.

Scott Conservatives are there to remind us what lines shouldn't be crossed and Liberals are there to remind us what lines we shouldn't have drawn in the first place.

Chris And so has that responsibility then now flipped? That there are lines being crossed that shouldn't be crossed and Liberals need to draw those?

Scott Yeah, I think around norms of public life, it is flipped. It is people from the center to the center left that are in the position of defending certain traditions rather than sort of being the prophetic critics of... Yeah, it's interesting.

Chris I mean, you see that in your U.S. politics in sort of the response of the Democrats to the kind of norm-bashing that is occurring under the Trump administration. So like right now, I mean, the stonewalling Congress and, you know, we're just not going to comply with your subpoenas. There is this reticence that if we throw the norms out of the window as well, then we're never going to be able to get back to them. I think there is some kind of sense that I guess we've got to be drawing the lines now. With, you know, the kind of hopeful optimism that, you know, when there's a change in the White House, that we are going to reestablish what the norms of, you know, sort of constitutional governance need to be. But there's a sense that maybe this is like, but if we don't play by the rules now, then no one will remember what the rules were.

Whoever's in power four years from now, eight years from now, and kind of the only way to get back to constitutional government will be a revolution where we, you know, come up with— Then the problem is everybody says, but we're disadvantaged.

Scott If we're playing by the rules and the other side's not, you know, it goes back— I mean, this is the tension, right? Because once—I mean, so much of democratic life is norms, not rules and laws, right? And so once the horse gets out of the barn, it's so hard to get the horse back in.

Chris And so this, I think, kind of coming full circle, you know, this is why, you know, survey data about declining trust in public institutions is really concerning and why one thinks that, you know, it's the task of bringing norms back into democratic life. It is actually much bigger than the behavior of the political parties. It's also the behavior of media, and that's very difficult because it's entirely driven by commercial interests, and the commercial interests are entirely driven by sort of optimization algorithms. And division optimizes like, you know, sexy, sensational things that divide people is what optimizes eyeballs. So, you know, that institution now is so driven by sort of algorithmically measured profit motives That the kind of editorial responsibility of curating this is what we think as the fourth of state the civil society needs to know about is just blown away.

Scott This is the Tocqueville profit margin. I mean, it kind of—it overwhelms civic virtue.

Chris Right, right. And so I think it's profit margin there. I mean, you see it like with the courts. You could argue that it's sort of politics and the political divisions are— Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And so, you know, whereas one would kind of think of, you know, one of the strengths of democracy is that it is kind of a, you know, there are multiple pillars holding the house up and holding up these norms, that actually when you kind of do a wider health check on democratic institutions, that's when it starts to get scary. And you realize that, you know, what is happening in our political parties, which is just one of those institutions, is being reflected in the erosion of all these other pillars. So versus, you know, the kind of the, I think, and again, this is kind of maybe an under-told story, but when you look at the support for the political system and for public institutions in China, each of these pillars, you know, media, the party, the academy, the courts, are very strong, in fact, have been strengthened over the last several and many years to serve the function that they serve in that society.

And I'm not judging one or the other, but I'm remarking that whereas you can make a very compelling case that a lot of the democratic pillars are eroding, And that the decline in trust is – what do I want to say? There's another perfect English word that I'm missing. But the decline in trust is kind of being – like it's an emergent property of the whole system. And that where you would hope that there would be some kind of stepping in and shouldering the weight – Tim Ferriss, Jr.: : Yeah, for a structural collapse to what engineers then need to do. I don't know what an engineer would do.

Scott It's interesting, though. How does a bridge collapse, right? It's when there's external pressure on an internal fissure, right? There's like a crack in the bridge, right?

Chris Do you really know what you're talking about, or are you just talking to me? Yeah, no. I mean, think about this.

Scott There's something structurally weak, right? And then the external pressure is weighing on the right internal fissure, and then the thing breaks. We're probably seeing that. We're probably seeing that certain external pressures are revealing where the fissures are, where the internal fractures are. That may have been, yeah. Well, if we could resurrect the Tocqueville, I guess Democracy in America would be a very different book.

Chris Or maybe it wouldn't be. Maybe we just write an afterword. In terms of landing the plane, let me ask you the question this way. Do you think that it would be sort of – okay, I can't ask the question as artfully as I want to because we're kind of live off the cuff. But the question that I want to ask is a better version of this. Do you think it would be a good idea or disastrous for – You know, people with influence and maybe with an audience, you know, maybe some of the Democratic nominees would be one example right now to say, we need a constitutional convention.

Scott That's interesting. You know, there is a movement in America right now on the right to have, like, if you get 30 states or something, you can call one. Like, the states can call for one. You know, if enough states say, we need one. Yeah, that's interesting.

Chris I mean, I don't, I think it would, because, I mean, because you have, I mean, like, Supreme Court numbers and composition, you know, some people, I think it was Buttigieg who said, yeah, like, maybe we need to pack the court to address what's happened recently, and And also find ways to depoliticize it. There's some interesting... So, I mean, that's a big chunk of the Constitution, at least the Constitution that people are aware of. You know, there's gun control, there's abortion rights. I mean, so much of the agenda in the United States right now seems to be about, you know, what are the powers and responsibilities... So, yeah, but then that's what makes me think that, because that's just thinking too small, right? If you're trying to push one amendment through, then everybody sort of within the current political configuration plays that game. But to call for a constitutional convention is to say, let's put it all on the table.

Scott And you think the sheer mass, the volume of things up for grabs would sort of displace the ossified political perspective and stances.

Chris I guess to return to our bridge metaphor, pretending that none of us, I think, I don't have a degree in structural engineering, so I don't know what you're talking about. Nor do I. But to return to our bridge metaphor... If the bridge needs renewal, I kind of imagine what you do is you shut it down and you put all the scaffolding around it, because you kind of got to do it all at once. You got to take the load entirely off this bridge with some temporary scaffolding and supports and these big barges that you bring in, and then you replace it. You probably update it with new materials that weren't available when the bridge was built. And I wonder if that's... I mean, I... It's bold. It's bold. I'm not... Yeah, what I'm suggesting is, I wonder if this would, in a way, kind of just inject a kind of new sense of possibility into the discourse, you know, as a kind of what if, right? Well, what if we did, like, if we allowed ourselves to, like, just stop hating and contempting one another?

And say, okay, you know, because then it also raises the question, like, do we still want to do this together? And at least the threat that we might say no and end the project here maybe helps people to set aside some contempt and really look at what is here that we want to preserve and not continue to undermine.

Scott Yeah, the possibility that the marriage could end might keep it together. Like, realizing that it could end might keep it together. That's all right. All right. I like it. I mean, possibly. It's a bold suggestion.

Chris Hey, hey, I'm far enough away that I can throw stones. I love it. I love it. Well, I wanted to land on something practical. So, you know, wholesale constitutional reform. Exactly. This is an everyday thing. One takeaway. Unfortunately, I only have that one. So it's a pretty thin list.

Scott Well, for our next episode, we'll try to land the plane closer to the ground. But, you know, for that, as for today, that'll do. All right, well, we'll leave it there then. Thanks, my friend. Always mind-blowing.