Does democracy have a shelf life?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you, my friend?

Chris Oh, it's Saturday, so you gotta deal with my Saturday hair.

Scott I have a hat on because it's Saturday for me. I'm not even attempting any hair legitimacy or any kind of hair. Hair legitimacy. No Facebook Live for us because we're just, we're not ready for that.

Chris I wonder if I could get a research grant to study hair legitimacy. There are probably some interesting correlations between hair quality and political performance, social influence.

Scott Yeah, there's something. There's got to be. I mean, there's all these studies on height, right? Like CEOs and all that stuff. Oh, yeah? Yeah, they're like that people are more likely to hire tall CEOs or something like that.

Chris We're always kind of strangely fascinated when it turns out that we're still animals. Yeah. You know, that all of these things that kind of aren't relevant to a rational worldview actually still exist.

Scott Well, Nietzsche's right, though. Aristotle's wrong. We're not rational animals. We're rationalizing animals. Oh, that's a good one.

Chris You're saying that that's already been taken. I can't claim credit for that.

Scott Yeah, well, I'm just saying that's, yeah, I mean, Nietzsche was into really realizing how animal we are. By the way, can I tell you how many COVID cases we had in this country yesterday?

Chris How many?

Scott 181,194. We're up 76% over 14 days. We had 1,400 deaths, we're up 34% deaths, and 68,000 hospitalizations, so we're up 41%. This country's crazy. That's amazing. I mean, what do you respond to that, right?

Chris The thing is, it seems in most other countries, although I can't say that every country is struggling with its own situation. I mean, in Canada, because Canadian Thanksgiving happens in October, there was a pretty big uptick across the country after Thanksgiving because just the deep ritual of family getting together to celebrate. But other than that, there is a pretty broad consensus, certainly here in the UK, despite all of the political back and forth and stuff that, look, this is real. Vaccine is coming. That's great. In the meantime, there are these simple things that we need to do to contain as best we can. And that those simple things have become so difficult in the United States to kind of just get agreement on.

Scott It's out of control. I mean, it's just unbelievable. Canada's cases are up, but when you compare Canada's cases...

Chris And it kind of, you know, I know we're going to get into this once, you know, maybe 20 minutes from now we introduce the topic for our podcast today. But it relates to something that I know we're going to talk a bit about, which is, you know, there is this kind of fundamental contradiction at the heart of democracy, which is that in theory, you know, whether you're in power or out of power, you're interested in promoting the general welfare. Right. We've got different views of how best to do that. But, you know, that contest of ideas is productive and ultimately leads to, you know, good policy and good ideas to promote the general welfare. And, you know, this year in the US, I think, has just been such a stark example of how that's not really the game we're playing. Right. The game is to win. And often the best play is for things to go to hell.

And then blame somebody for it and get back into power that way. And it was really quite stark and astonishing to see. Really, I think it was the politicization of the fact that it was an urban phenomenon first. And big cities tend to be democratic hubs. And so you could make this really association of like, look where the problem is, is where you have these people in power, and they are the problem. And so that, to me, is the stark difference in Canada, for example, where there's just still a kind of overriding sense that, no, this is clearly, in the general interest, we've all got to sing by this song sheet because the consequences of not doing so are so bad and so avoidable that how could we possibly get away with that? But it's a real stark example of just how, I don't know, I mean, is democracy an anachronism now? Like all of the fundamental assumptions of it?

Scott So it's really interesting, just the politicization of the whole thing. I have a friend who's a minister in Pennsylvania, in central Pennsylvania, and I asked him, what's his congregation doing in COVID? And he's like, oh, we're indoors. He's a Republican kind of conservative guy. He's like, we're worshiping indoors, no mask, no social distancing. And I said, really? He said, yeah, well, because I think if you're in a conservative church, that's what you have to do. Otherwise, they think you're giving in to Biden and the virus and the mask. And I'm thinking, wow, it's that explicit. I mean, that it was not just a sort of a kind of guttural thing. You know, it's not just a guttural kind of feeling. It's articulated this way. Like, it's explicit. I was shocked how explicitly he could identify why they're not doing what normal people think are best practices. And it was a political act.

Chris I mean, I guess, you know, and that's, you know, a lot of, and a lot of people have kind of commented on this and written on this. I think of, I don't know if you've ever read Zygmunt Bowman. He, this really just fascinating social theorist who passed away recently, I think. He wrote a series of books. The one that comes to mind right now is Liquid Modernity. So basically about kind of the liquefaction of so much stability that used to be sort of taken for granted, like norms and stuff like that. But one of the things that he talked about is how dangerous it is when politics becomes so personalized that your political views become kind of an integral part of your self-identity.

Scott Yeah, your ideas do the identity work.

Chris Yeah, and so therefore, I mean, it's a betrayal to your own self-identity and all of the people, you know, kind of upon whom you rely for community to be on the wrong side of any political argument. And you think about, like, that's insane. Like, why do I have to sort of conform with, you know, everything that my group agrees with in order to stay a member of that group? I mean, it's kind of... I don't know. It's such a clear example of how far we've gone down that road of making everything so personal.

Scott Yeah, it is. Again, this is like the essence of American life right now. I mean, this is what I live every day. By the way, we should mention that we had a great Basecamp meeting that was last, that was a week ago, Saturday.

Chris Oh my God, it's been a week already.

Scott Yeah, that was great. I had a great group. My small group was wonderful. The question we gathered was, what do I need? What do I need, yeah.

Chris Where did you guys take it?

Scott Some people were more personal. I think I was on the more personal end. Some people were a lot on the self-awareness end. There were people talking about the kind of voices they need in their life to be aware and that kind of thing. So there was a combination of the kind of perception versus the personal. Because for me, it was very much about human connection. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for watching. But, you know, I thought it was a great gathering, and I just, you know, I continue to just, I'm intrigued by the kind of people that are convened in the group. And, I mean, it's interesting, too, because, right, it's getting far beyond you, right? There's tons of people, the majority of people involved now, you probably don't even know.

Chris I have no idea who these people are, but it's great. I mean, that's what makes it more exciting for me, you know, getting into these breakout groups with people and you wonder, how did you find your way here? But the shared, the space, even though it's virtual, has become real enough that, you know, sort of first timers arrive and the space kind of helps them find, oh, this is what we're meant to do here. We're meant to begin impactful, meaningful conversations that we feel are missing around this shared question. And so I think we're getting really, really good at creating that space and helping people to kind of get into that space and into the mindset to have those conversations. And I think it's all connected, right? Like we're talking about what's happening politically and the personalization of politics. And we talk about all of us kind of being in our own echo chambers because of how technology divides us and the media environment and our social and economic circumstance or how educated we are in the school of We're going somewhere together as a tribe, as a subculture.

And so I think we do need, you know, just to create some global gathering spaces where it's possible to get together differently with other people who, you know, who I have not met because the algorithm has said that we are going to agree and reinforce one another's feelings. We're coming together with a Through a different kind of serendipity that allows us to leave there with just a kind of a reminder that, oh, reality is much bigger than what's real for me. And that feels like, you know, maybe like the fundamental assumption that we've forgotten upon which, you know, things like democracy depend.

Scott Yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely right, which brings us kind of to our question that we... You set the question for this one.

Chris I love your question, so why don't I let you...

Scott Yeah, which, you know, for those who are listening, this is kind of what we're doing with the podcast for the foreseeable future. We're going to try to ask questions that have both a timely and timeless nature, right? So questions that we, as we ask them, they're... They're contextually timely, but also they might reveal some timeless truths or timeless insights that are really worth pondering. And so the question was, does democracy have a shelf life? As we think about democracy, and I remember, it's funny because as I think about this question, I remember one of our first podcasts we ever did, you were talking about the Divos crowd.

Chris The Davos crowd, you mean?

Scott The Davos crowd, right. The Davos kind of crowd, that kind of international business elite kind of gathering, and how they're sort of... There was the sense that democracy was kind of passé, and they're looking admirably at things like China was doing, right, economically, and that there's this kind of skepticism about the functionality of democratic economies versus China's autocratic economy, which is leading to all this growth. I just remember us talking about that. That's got to be, I don't know, over a year ago or something. So this question is just something that is on my mind. The United States has just gone through an election cycle, which now is still... I mean, it's a strange thing because all the media has called... What's the future of Western liberal democracy? Does it have a shelf life? Does it have an expiration date? And are things like pandemics, racial unrest, other factors really contributing to this question or giving the occasion for raising the question? Are we watching the deterioration of this kind of way of life?

Chris Well, so giant question, right? There's a billion ways to take it. Maybe let's take the easy one first, which I'm sure is going to be, you know, part of what so many pundits and talking heads will reference right now on a question of like, you know, so how is democracy doing as a way of society figuring out how to organize itself? David Pryor, CFO Alphabet and Google I mean, there's still a very strong assumption, it seems, in kind of, you know, American institutions and talking heads and stuff that ultimately he is going to leave the White House. He's not going to stage a coup. And assuming that that does end up happening, that Biden does become president. I mean. It's still, you know, that's kind of fundamentally what democracy kind of thumps its chest about. And so, like, this is pretty incredible, right? Like, look at all the guns.

Look at all the bombs that, you know, this government controls and the person who runs this government has power over and that the people can just sort of mark an X or like tap a screen en masse. And that person has to give it all up.

Scott You know, until it wants to go. Yeah, it was interesting, too, in this election, too, because it's interesting to figure out what voters said, right? Because that's the other thing, right? If you're thinking about a democracy, like, what do elections tell you? Because, interestingly, the polling was way off. I mean, at least at the state level. The national polls might turn out to be... Most people, if you're a Republican in this country, and if you get over the emotion of losing the presidency, Republicans did pretty well in the election. I mean, they're probably going to keep the Senate, and no Republican House member that was up for reelection lost. And several Republicans actually beat Democrats. So the Democratic majority, which still exists in the House, shrunk. So interestingly, you got rid of the head of the Republican Party in Donald Trump, but then actually Republicans picked up seats in the legislature. So what does that say? I mean, this is kind of like, I mean, I guess it says there are at least a large group of people that split their ticket, that voted against Trump, and then voted for Trumpian kind of politicians. Which is such an interesting kind of phenomenon. What's in the mood of the voter?

What do you take away from elections? If elections are referendums or if they are ways in which people are expressing, this is the public voice, this is the voice of the people. It seems like the voice is gargled.

Chris Yeah, I mean, maybe that's part of the, you know, one of the challenges of it is that there are so many steps between my vote and the outcome of the election that along the way, there's plenty of room for anyone to kind of interpret it how they want. So, yeah, so the will of the voter is very unclear. That's, I think, yeah, that's true, and especially this election. Although, you know, and I don't know, like, I haven't, you know, I haven't dug into the data of how people exactly voted and form my own view of what does it mean. I suspect one broad takeaway for people will be that it was really a referendum on his handling of the coronavirus. And we thought he did a really shitty job of that. But we're not going to blame our Republican senators or Congress people for that, because actually, we don't think that they were on the wrong side. We think that it was the president who fumbled the ball. That would be one explanation that would put the pieces together. And I guess it kind of, you know, so to your question, like, you know, how is democracy doing, I think, and what's the lifespan of the democracy? There is this, what we're really talking about is the big question of accountability. Right. So one of the ideas is that it's a system to hold the people with power to account. And, you know, I mean, in some ways, maybe that Trump wasn't reelected was almost like a data point that goes against the broader trend or the broader argument that seems to suggest, like, actually, it's doing a really piss poor job of holding people to account.

If you think of the global financial crisis, did anybody go to jail for that? If you think of the war in Iraq, did anybody go to jail for that? Do we think of the coronavirus and all these tens of thousands of people who have died unnecessarily? All of these giant corporations that can funnel hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever into lobbying, to affecting... And if you don't believe that, then, you know, are you going to turn out and vote? So I think one of the, you know, one of the maybe accomplishments of Donald Trump is all these people who felt like, you know, politics is just this game that actually doesn't accomplish anything for me, came back and reengaged and decided that somehow this person and what he's saying and what I believe he's going to do is going to affect me.

Scott What's interesting, though, I think, is that balkanization kind of erodes democracy, right? When people can't listen to the other side and you get your information from one source and the voter becomes less and less critically informed and becomes a lot, you know, like we're just watching one news source or whatever and the opposition watches another news source.

Chris What's interesting is Trump was- I can tell listening to you for like 10 seconds, you are a hardcore socialist.

Scott Exactly, I'm just a socialist right now. That's what Republicans call Democrats, socialists, and Democrats call Republicans these right-wing religious gun-toters and all this stuff. But what happens, I think, is that people didn't like Trump as a polarizing figure, right? That was one of the reasons I think a lot of people, even Republicans that voted against him, like, he's so polarizing. And yet we consistently reward polarizing figures. So we don't- Because the system's not working.

Chris Right? And so I'm looking for the outsider candidate who's going to make it work. And that was his message, right? And that's what Hillary Clinton's message was not. She was a creature of the system.

Scott So we don't reward, though. Our elections tend to not reward constructive collaborators that can compromise and build consensus. Our elections tend to reward polarizing figures. So again, you look at this most recent election. Yeah, we got rid of a polarizing figure at the top, but reelected a lot of polarizing figures in the legislature who are not compromisers. We can't even get another corona relief package passed in this country. And that's something everybody thinks we need, right? If you ask your average American, of course we need help with this, right? But we reward people that continue to balkanize the system.

Chris So this is, you know, and this is, we've talked in the past about kind of how, you know, parliamentary democracy and American democracy kind of differ. Like you've got the split executive, right? In a parliament like here in the UK, the prime minister is also part of Congress, essentially. And if you've got a majority, then you just basically, you've got the reins of power and you do what you want to do for four or five or eight years. And then people can kind of clearly evaluate, okay, that's when you're in charge, how do things look? And so you kind of take turns doing exactly what you want to do and evaluating the consequence. In the U.S. system, it seems like there's, and the coronavirus, you know, aid package is a classic example. If, let's say Biden gets, you know, actually comes into office, assuming he will, like, what's the incentive if Mitch McConnell is the head of the Senate, right, to help pass the legislation to do some massive, like, $3 trillion stimulus package? That that's then going to basically give Biden a blank check to say, let's we're going to rebuild America and and take credit for it so that in four years and people like, wow, you know, how has Biden do on the job? Well, he's actually done a lot. We've got new roads. We've got new highways. We've got this new light rail system that's connecting states or whatever it might be. Right. Three trillion dollars is a lot of stimulus.

And so like, well, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to hand a win. I don't want to demonstrate to the people that with this person in charge, life gets better. I want people to think that with this person in charge, life gets worse. So, you know, if you think about it just as a system, that seems a bit messed up, right? Because basically what you end up having happen is, you know, I'm not a loyal opposition. I am a subversive opposition. And each time real power changes hands, we're gonna spend the first few years of that undoing what the other person tried to do so that we're never really going to achieve some long-term progress on anything. And you think of, go back in time, some of the long-term plays Obama does at the end of his presidency. So I'm gonna start to normalize relations with Cuba. And one of the first things Trump does in the office is like, the hell with that. We're not going down that road. We're gonna go the other way.

You know, just one of a billion examples, you know, climate change, you know, giant example. So I guess that kind of gets into why we're opening like this. You open this can of worms and all the worms squirrel up. But this is another thing that you kind of wonder, like, geez. We've got all of these generational challenges that we're facing. You know, climate change, nature, this whole technological transformation, AI and 5G and all of these different technologies. You know, it's going to be some kind of like energy revolutions underway. You know, it seems like all of the big things that need to be fixed are generational fixes. So how are we even begin to make progress on that when, you know, at best we can plan sort of a three to four year horizon? And not only that, but every time, you know, somebody else takes a range, we go back two years. They go in a different direction.

Scott In the United States, how this works very concretely, I think, is that basically the legislature is completely ineffective now, right? And so what happens is you wind up doing like what both Obama and Trump do. You wind up governing by executive orders, right? But these things are not, they don't have the same kind of force as legislation, so the next executive can come in and just undo them. And undo even more, is what you're saying.

Chris Right. Even worse, we're just gonna ping pong back and forth and no one's gonna go up.

Scott So I think the way, if you look at our Constitution, where the action is is the legislature. The founders create this document where the action seems to be in the House and the Senate, but the way it plays out now, the action is in the executive branch and the courts. The legislature, it's largely ineffective. Unless, again, you get super majorities, like Obama his first two years had a significant majority in the House and Senate and got through Obamacare, and then the next six years, How much did he accomplish? Very little. Because as soon as the Republicans got in, there was, and again, like he did a lot of stuff just via executive fiat that then gets just rolled back in the next election.

Chris Right. Well, and, you know, Obamacare, another example of, so you put that in place and that's, you know, you've got a few years to build that up and somebody else comes to power and we spend those few years building it down again. So we've managed to make some gains, but... Really struggles to respond to a kind of mass public healthcare event where it would really help the public welfare if everybody could just afford to go to the hospital, get checked out, and didn't worry about those things. Because there's these community consequences of me not having the healthcare resources to check out, am I okay? Am I alright? And so you recognize, wow, I don't want to give Trump any credit for their handling of the pandemic, but it was part of what made it harder in the US versus, say, here in the UK, where the National Health Service

is such a cultural institution that when any politician says, OK, the health service is in crisis because of all these cases, without even kind of thinking their way through it, people are like, oh, that's bad. So what do you want us to do? You don't have that kind of relationship with healthcare and with the system that supplies it.

Scott Even in Canada, somebody from Basecamp, a Canadian friend, has told me, I found this really interesting because we have these, there was, for instance, this sheriff in Florida somewhere who actually made a rule where no masks allowed in my sheriff's office. So it was an opposite mask mandate. And this friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours from the Basecamp community was telling me that wouldn't happen in Canada because in each province, the public health officials have so much authority that they could come in and just overturn that kind of by fiat if some crazy sheriff in Canada tried to do that. But we don't have those kind of officials here, and we don't have any mechanism like that. And the other thing that I think in a pandemic that makes our system Again, uniquely unsuited to deal with this. If Joe Biden becomes president, when Joe Biden becomes president, he can't institute a national mask mandate. That would get struck down in our courts immediately, like states' rights. And you could say, is this democratic? Is it healthy? Or is it a dysfunctional form of democracy? You have my friends in Arizona. You have the mayor of Phoenix, who's a Democrat. All right. Thank you so much.

Our federalist system works where all these states have all these rights, all these localities within the states have all these rights. And maybe it's functional on some levels, but culturally, at least, it makes a big, diverse democracy that's livable because you don't have to live the same way in Mississippi as you do in California. But when you have national problems like a pandemic, it just seems like we're completely, even again, if we had a capable president, the system would mitigate effective action.

Chris There's just so much learning to take away. The US right now is just a great sort of case study upon which to launch all sort of deep thinking about democracy and system of government. And the fact that there was this election this year and this pandemic just makes it There are going to be so many books and theses written over the next few years about all of this. Listening to you talk about the mask mandate, I guess what feels so glaringly missing is an embodiment of the general welfare. Any reality to that phrase, which, you know, it seems that if you think of how the debate unfolded, you know, and Joe Biden, he talked about science and kind of appealing to science. That's how we'll decide to do the universal stuff if science tells us. And I feel like even that appeal sort of hints at there is something missing that we couldn't, because you'd feel like that we would have a closer relationship to the general welfare, and that would be more influential than to say we should appeal to science, which for most people is very abstract. That is some kind of conceptual thing. There's all sorts of power relationships when you tell me science says I have to do this.

There's a lot of history of bad science, eugenics. We've got this agenda. We're going to cloak it in these words called science. Like, okay, I guess we should do that. So that there's a society that has deep suspicions about just doing something because science says. That might be good, healthy, critical thinking reaction. But that there's a society where we can't talk about the general welfare. I mean, you open this by saying, like, do you know how many cases there were? And that that number doesn't affect people.

Scott Yeah, no, I mean, that's what's amazing. There's no sense I have in this country. That there's really any more urgency or there's really any new kind of initiative or an energy created by these numbers. And these numbers are going up every day. A couple weeks ago, we hit 75,000 cases. And I was like, wow, that's the highest we've had since July. And now this is more than doubling. And even if you adjust for size, like per capita, what do they say? What do you times things in Canada to scale the US? Like times 10? It's like times 10 or something, right?

Chris Yeah, because Canada's about 36 million people at the moment.

Scott Yeah, so let's say they had 4,000 cases. Let's say it's per capita 40,000 cases. We have four and a half times that. And my friends in Canada are telling me that Canadians are freaking out over their increase and worried and thinking about lockdown and all this stuff. And we here are like... At least half the country, at least half the country is not for any measures like that. Like, I mean, they're just completely indifferent to any kind of lockdown measures they get.

Chris So I guess, you know... What's becoming clear in my head is, in your system of government, if I'm concerned about where is the general welfare represented, I guess the answer is supposed to be in the presidency, in the office of the presidency, as the head of state, in the way that here in this country, the queen or the crown, constitutionally, what do they do? They have no real power, but they can always speak on behalf of the whole because they are above the party politics. There's an opportunity in your system of government. You've got the House, it's all very politicized. The Senate's all politicized. The Senate represents the states and the House represents the population bases. The presidency could be. The fact that it's an electoral college and not a direct popular vote confuses it. But the rhetoric, I think, classically has always kind of been that, you know, now that I've been elected, I'm for national healing. I'm going to be the president for, you know, for Democrats and for Republicans. I mean, the kind of stuff that, you know, Biden said in his victory speech, which used to be just total cliche and now actually sounds novel.

But I think I think, you know, we'll never know that world. How how different might it have been? If the presidency, and forget that Trump was president, just the presidency in 2020 had been kind of a voice of national unity around this pandemic and said, like, here's how we need to approach it. Here's how we as a country are doing. And made it something that made it permissible to really rally around a problem in a way that was unifying and not divisive by party. I mean, we'll never know. But that's the only institution you've got that I think can

Scott Yeah, and that is, I mean, the hard thing, the challenge, it's interesting. I'm working on this film project with a guy right now named David Shields, and I'm just kind of helping him do some intellectual history work for this film about basically, like, the post-truth world. He's a really interesting writer and filmmaker. And we were talking about, and we've been working on this for a couple hours a day. It's been one of the most exciting intellectual projects I've done in a while. And we were talking about this. I'm starting to feel kind of jealous here. I know. I should bring you into one of our conversations because you would love this.

Chris Are we both going to be friends?

Scott Yeah, exactly. I'm not breaking up with you. It's a polyamorous relationship. But we were talking about something really interesting that you look at like perspectively. How is it that I've not heard about him before? So we're talking about this move where postmodernism and perspectivalism kind of, this starts as an ethical kind of thing, right? In some ways, like there's power games and we all want to acknowledge our perspectives because there's, you know, people of color have one perspective or feminists or Jews or... And Trump does the same kind of thing. And Steve Bannon and all the... And some of these people, like Steve Bannon, I think he's pretty smart. And so we're trying to figure out how did this... And what does the left do? The irony of the left is the left is crying for old school objectivity now. Like, oh my gosh, we've got to get facts back. And it's hard to put these horses back in the barn. And again, these things, ideas often have consequences we don't foresee. Like Gutenberg, right? The guy who invented the printing press.

Thank you so much for having me. The debate is not about, okay, we're adversaries in a debate, but hopefully what happens from the democratic debate process is some kind of general consensus comes out or some sense of, like over decades, right? Social Security and Medicare in this country. Right. Were looked at originally as kind of, you know, left-wing ideas, but through gradual consensus now, even Republicans like Social Security and Medicare, right, over decades you get this kind of consensus that these are good for the general welfare. I can't imagine anything like that being recognized today.

Chris So I guess, I think, so the word that's screaming in my head is complexity.

Scott Yes, yeah.

Chris And so, you know, the question is, how does politics cope with complexity? And, you know, this word perspectivalism, which is, you know, well, that's a big word, right? And you'd go into it. Yeah, like reality is so complex. And then, you know, if we're going to try to take all of these complexities on board and think about all the implications of it. Suddenly, the voice of simplicity becomes really, really attractive. And I think that's something that the... You know, really two quite remarkable political campaigns of Donald Trump kind of demonstrated is the allure of simplicity. Because when things get really, really, really complex, I feel like there's, you know, there's kind of two ways that I'm going to respond. I'm either going to get kind of apathetic, like this is all just a mess and nothing is real, or you kind of get reductivist and you look for...

You look for a shortcut to making sense of it, right? You want to understand why your jobs are disappearing. Those immigrants are taking them away, right? Oh, nice, simple, right? You want to understand why there's all this stuff in media that you don't agree with and don't understand and it's challenging your worldview. It's because they're wrong. And biased. And biased, right? So these simple messages in a complex world, I think, are so alluring. And it becomes a real question for, I remember in 2016 when Trump was elected and I'm doing the rounds on radio and kind of talking about the consequences of it. And I remember I had the last word and my last word was, Demagogues do really poorly governing complex multi-ethnic societies. And that's what the United States is. You know, if you think about it, this is a gross generalization and it's a wrong statement in many ways, but in some ways it's true. The United States is a far more complex society than China is.

Where 90%, the overwhelming majority of just the ethnographic population kind of identifies as Han Chinese, like we're all the same, and then there's a few outsiders. It's more complex than that, but these advanced liberal democracies, like Canada, like the United States, where there's just, there's so much variety of life, and there's a system that encourages it all to express itself. It gets really, really complex. And you see it, too, in democracies that are more ethnically homogeneous. In some ways, it's easier. It's a lot easier.

Scott Look, Scandinavia, I mean, so many liberals, myself included, look to Scandinavia as kind of a model of what we could do, of general welfare kind of politics. But then you look, they're smaller and a lot more humongous. The social trust factor is so high. It's so much higher.

Chris Oh, high. I've got to get a brief example of that.

Scott Because it's a different... I'm going up to Phoenix Monday, right? And... My friends are telling me, they're kind of joking with me, you'll have the pleasure of going to the supermarket and seeing people with guns strapped to their hips like the Wild West. You don't go anywhere in the Northeast and see that. People can bring assault weapons into Applebee's here in Phoenix. What? Seriously? Open carry of an assault weapon? It's not fully automatic. Oh, okay. It's semi-automatic. Semi-automatic. You can bring that into a restaurant with you. Again, it gets to the diversity of the culture. In the Northeast, where I've spent most of my adult life, you couldn't... There's nothing like that. And that's the same country.

Chris So maybe that's a... Maybe that's an argument for the necessity of the presidency in the US to play the role of representing a notion of unity. Because if there's no strong, empowered institution that has that role, the forces of disunity, I mean, you just don't have a chance. There are so many forces to kind of spin things apart.

Scott And I love what you said about simplicity because, I mean, I'm a Trump rally connoisseur. I watch every Trump rally I can because I'm fascinated.

Chris And it's remarkable political— That's dark. I just realized I haven't been spending enough time with you.

Scott Exactly. Look at me. I'm seeing other people in intellectual projects and watching Trump rallies.

Chris I didn't realize it was that bad. I apologize. That's on me. This is where you've taken me to. I should have seen the signs. Exactly. You're all at the office all the time. You're not paying attention to me.

Scott I'm trying to save the world, man. I can't save you. When I watch them, it's masterful, the simplicity you're talking about, like the theater and the way he can kind of spin a narrative and convince people who he's doing nothing for and whom he would not socialize with if you had a gun to his head. And he's convincing them. He's one of them. And he goes to some place in the hour outside of Omaha, right? And he's like, you're the elites, not them. You're better looking. You've got better houses. And it's fascinating, this kind of thing he creates. And these people aren't stupid. They know that he's kind of bullshitting them, and yet they kind of buy into it, right? And it creates this kind of, it papers over the complexity, like you're saying. It kind of, all right, you know, because now I have someone at least to blame for my problems. My problems might not be getting better, but at least I've got a story I can indwell that makes me feel better about them.

Chris So, you know, I feel like, you know, what's the lifespan of democracy? It's not a question we can answer in one. One one episode. But I feel like you've put your finger on one of the big questions. And I think that, you know. There's a version of this question that we all need to ask ourselves, which is, I don't know if I can articulate it, but it's like, how engaged am I? I'm not sure if that's the question, but there's some version where the viability of democracy affects each of us. Practically and emotionally. And if we could find the version, if we can find that version of the question, that's the one that kind of the whole world needs to be asking itself. Because, you know, even like armchair theorists, like, oh, so why democracy? And there's this classic line that it's, you know, it's the least bad of all the alternatives. Well, the 21st century, you know, led by China, is really going to challenge that argument and say, like, you democracies, you need a much stronger argument than that.

Scott Yeah, this is a friend of mine, Ed Watts, who's an ancient historian. He's at UC San Diego. He's written a book called Mortal Republic, and he does a lot of work on ancient Rome and the deterioration of the Republic into autocracy. And I asked him during a podcast, I said, Ed, like, okay, you live in ancient Rome. Like, would you rather be in the Republic or... The autocracy for the empire is what produces a lot of infrastructure in Rome that actually helps the average citizen, right? And so I think your China argument is brilliant because it's going to, you know, when you're going to, you know, China, like how much are they going around the world and building other people's infrastructure, right?

Chris And the empire can have that kind of time horizon.

Scott Yeah, yeah. Where if you're kind of in the developing world, you're in Ethiopia or something, what is the United States doing for you versus what China's coming in and building ports and roads? And I think your point there is so well taken. It's going to be... I think there's an alternative argument to be made. Americans are so lazy about free markets, free people, this kind of wedding of capitalism and liberal democratic values, but China's saying, no, we can give you market capitalism without the liberalism, and it's more efficient.

Chris And we can give you generational agendas. We can see the challenges we face in the world. Like on climate change, on the Naturefile, China is far more ambitious than the United States at the moment. They've got these astonishing national plans to basically zone the whole country the way you zone a city and say industrial is going to move over there. This whole swath, you know, 35% of the landmass is going to be untouched ecological services, things like forests and rivers and stuff like that going forward. And, you know, it's obvious that we want to move to a kind of post-oil energy future because we don't have any oil here in the Chinese mainland. We're always oil importers. So they've got all of these strong incentives to Thank you very much. This kind of passe politics of protecting physical swaths of land because you need to get

the liquid stuff in the ground and the rest of the world's looking at you and like, wow, you're... Your global strategic thinking is lost in a previous generation of energy production. It's just a completely different game. I don't know, I'm kind of getting too far afield there.

Scott No, but as you're talking and saying this, everything you're saying, I'm just sitting here thinking, this is completely believable. The picture you're painting, it doesn't sound fantastic to me or imaginary. I'm like, oh yeah, okay. I'm thinking, what's the timeline when this will be true? I'm not thinking, oh my gosh, wow, Chris, you're really speculating here. I think, yeah, that sounds right. That's how we're gonna be. I mean, is it a couple decades? How long is it before this? It looks like this, but the picture you're painting to me seems absolutely realistic.

Chris So I wonder if, you know, I wonder if we ask, you know, how do, let's just take the US example for now. You know, how do you bring some longevity into the system, which I think could help with some of these, you know, the complexity problem, you know, could help with a lot of the divisiveness problem. There are all these other issues we've identified, but the ability to think and act long term seems to be part of it. And you say, well, again, the presidency could theoretically do that. Maybe it would help if instead of this Thank you very much. And to win the House, you've got to kind of slice it into districts. But if there was just direct popular vote for the president, then that office wouldn't slice. It would say, what are the most popular positions to take? Thank you very much. But in, you know, in some sense of, I don't know who, I don't know.

I don't know what that world, who I am as a person, you know, what new ideas I would bring and ask you to get on board with, you know, what my vision is for what else we should be doing.

Scott But, you know, there's this adage, like, you know, you get the government you deserve. And I wonder how much of this is also the citizenry, right? So I don't know how much of it is the office or the citizenry, right? So I think, you know, A kind of a democratic republic like the United States kind of requires an educated citizen, a civically educated citizenry, right, to identify the common good and then reward people that And that's where I just think, again, the electorate is, we get more and more ignorant, we get more and more polarized, and I just wonder if the, even if you kind of restructured the electoral mechanism, you still have the same voters. I think a lot of the kind of changes we need to get a more vibrant democracy, one that would have a longer shelf life, I think are cultural changes that are hard to make. You have to get people that are more reflective and less polarized and more able to see another person's point of view so that they can see, Where is there a possibility for consensus?

You're kind of over here and I'm over here, but we do have some overlapping values and we could get together on X, Y, and Z for the common good. And I just don't know how we, and maybe the rejection of Trump is a step in the right direction. But again, there's so many people though that have been reelected that I don't, that I think are culturally probably almost as problematic and they're still being rewarded by being reelected.

Chris Thank you very much. And, you know, I guess my hypothesis would be the answer will be some, right? And it won't be as much as the optimists want, and it might not be as little as the pessimists believe. It might be kind of somewhere in the middle. But I think you're right on this kind of fundamental question of like, you know, can democracy work? And it's interesting to think that kind of like the modern form of democracy, like, I don't think we're going to see it disappear in our lifetimes. It's been around for a couple thousand years, and it would be pretty extraordinary if we were the ones who lived to see the end of it. And there's a philosophical principle, I don't know if you know it, the Copernican principle, that basically says, you know, if your belief would require that kind of you're extraordinary in time and space, it's probably not the right belief. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, so the Earth probably isn't the center of the universe. That would make us extraordinary. Or probably not. But, you know, modern democracy with kind of everyone having the vote and mass media and political parties and all the kind of the way we do it now and in the social media age, this is just, you know, we've only been doing this form of democracy for 100 years or so, you know, a couple of lifetimes. So if that form were to really catastrophically fall apart, that actually wouldn't be so extraordinary in a historical lens, right? That was just an experiment that didn't go that way.

And it's hard to kind of know, I guess, where we go from here. I think there's a ton of answers to the questions like, how do we fix things? How do we make things better? I don't know if there's a ton of confidence that it's happening. And so, you know, not that Biden needs any more pressure, but... You know, for your country, I think his presidency is going to be a really, really important one to evaluate where does the change need to come from. And so his experiment will be, well, let's see what happens when it comes from the top. And not to put any pressure on you, but everything that is left is going to have to come from the bottom, which is probably going to be a lot.

Scott You know, get your rest. Yeah, I'm in agreement. I mean, I think it will be an interesting time again in that. I mean, it's funny because I was out in the streets a couple nights after. It was like the Saturday. It was kind of like, I think it was like a week. Yeah, it was like a week ago when the city just went nuts because people were just out dancing in the streets because it looked like Biden had finally, now Pennsylvania was a lock and the Electoral College was a lock. And people, I've just not seen anything like this. It was bigger than when, like, the Phillies won the World Series or the Eagles won the Super Bowl. It was bigger than that. I mean, spontaneous just out dancing in the streets, marching around. I mean, the police closed off the streets and all this stuff. And it did make me think, well, maybe is there a possibility for a ground-up Democratic movement? Because this celebration is interesting. Right? This is saying something, you know, for people to kind of all mobilize and celebrate in a way that socially that dense was interesting. And I thought maybe, you know, maybe we're capable of a longer shelf life than on my cynical days, I think, because that was moving and it was very diverse. It was a young crowd, too. And I mean, multiracial, gay, straight, you know, LGBT. I mean, it's really...

And I felt myself very moved. I was like, this is really interesting. I found emotionally, I was swept up in the sense of we're in this together. We kind of turned a corner and got rid of something that seemed to a lot of people very dangerous in the culture. So maybe there's hope in that regard, in that there's that kind of collective hope, joy, and imagination.

Chris I think that's a great chance to bring this meandering conversation full circle because we were talking at the top about rational beings and rationalizing beings and Nietzsche. And I think the one thing that Trump demonstrated very powerfully is that we're more than that. We are emotional beings. The kind of magic with which people ruled in ancient times, we can still respond to it. The rhythms and the drum beats and the spells that people cast. And he really cast a spell for people. You've attended every one of his rallies. At least virtually. And so the simplification, I think, is an element there. I'm simplifying reality for you. But the emotional magic is also there. I'm sweeping you up in something that gives you a feeling. And it's a good feeling. And so I think that'll be the other piece. And maybe this will be the thing that people will feel like is missing with Biden at the top, is can you sweep me up? Can you emotionally activate me so that I care about your agenda and I care about the country as you help me see it through your eyes, I think will be...

You know, maybe the hardest test for a President Biden who wants everybody to see the America that he sees. And it's not enough to describe it to me. You have to make me feel it. So, again, we just seem to be adding more pressure on.

Scott Well, but here's the thing where I want to change the pressure because I think I want to bring it back to Basecamp. Right. Because I think. If democratic society is going to have, at least in its late modern Western form, have a longer and healthier shelf life, it's going to be through participating in democratic culture. So Basecamp, it's a great training ground for democracy, for democratic skills and practices, learning to dialogue, learning to ask deep questions, learning how to share and listen. And so you think about-

Chris I don't, yeah, I don't agree with it, yeah.

Scott Right, that's, I mean, it's kind of, you know, Weber thinks one of the things that gives birth to the West and some of its dynamism is like, well, you have this weird institution like the church, which isn't quite the family and it's not quite the state, and that builds out into guilds and other kind of like mediating institutions in civil society that aren't, they're not the state and they're not the family, right? They're these kind of mediating spaces. And I think, I think like Basecamp, it'll be, Participation in communities like this, where you have this textured, thick, and rich conversational culture, that I think will help keep the shelf life of democratic life going. And they're worth their weight in gold, because a community like Basecamp is worth its weight in gold, because... At least in the United States, social media and tribalism and balkanization become the norm.

When you have a non-balkanized, non-tribal space where you can actually take a minute and breathe and talk and listen and it's joyful, that's going to be the thing, I think, that'll reshape democratic culture because it's democratic training ground.

Chris Well, I'll use that opportunity to give a brief plug. The next Global Campfire is December 12th. The question we're going to be talking about is, what has 2020 revealed to me? Which I mean, I've got to end the year on that question, right? And give us all a chance to just amplify our own sort of annual review of what happened in this incredible year and what does it mean? You know, with a room full of dozens of people from four or five continents. I think it'll be, I think it'll be great. I think it'll be powerful. The website, go to Basecamp.com.

Scott That's the way. Yeah, go to Basecamp.com. And if you're not, if you're listening and you haven't been to Basecamp, please come. I mean, I'm just, I'm making a, you know, I implore you, please come. Because it's, if you like this podcast and you find it helpful and useful, it's a very similar cultural... Yeah, and you don't know who you'll connect with. I mean, you really, you know, I mean, it's really interesting. I had a wonderful conversation with someone from Australia who reached out to me about the podcast and stuff like that, you know, and she's delightful. And I mean, wow, what a wonderful connection, you know, I made, you know, just a couple of days after that meeting. And it's really, I can't say enough good about it. If you feel like you're in a place where, oh my gosh, I want to have more rich, deep conversations around big questions. Thanks for watching.

This is great. We should do it on Saturday more often because even though it's like I'm basically, I was laying in bed thinking, all right, I got to get up. Here I go. I'm not going to get dressed. I appreciate it. Well, I mean, I'm dressed, but I'm not dressed formally or anything.

Chris No, I appreciate you. Even if you're intellectually cheating on me now, that's fine.

Scott Exactly. If there's any couples counselors listening, you can reach out to us. All right, my friend. Thanks.