We’re back from summer break and diving into the 2024 election season, Donald Trump’s indictments, the spread of election deniers, and more. We also welcome Michael Berkman back from sabbatical and discuss the significance of “Democracy 2024” as the backdrop for the first Republican presidential debate on August 23.

For our listeners who teach American politics, we’ve put together a list of episodes designed to be a companion to your courses. Check it out at democracyworkspodcast.com/syllabus.

Referenced in this episode: Votebeat piece by Jessica Huseman on Trump indictments

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith  I’m Candice Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Welcome back, everybody. We are back in the swing of things after our summer break from the show. I hope you all enjoyed the episode that we put out over the summer, you heard from some other podcasts and some things that we didn’t quite get to in the last academic year. But we are also excited, Michael, to have you back with us. You were on sabbatical last semester. So Michael, welcome back.

Michael Berkman Well, thank you. It’s great to be back. I missed the show. And I missed all of you.

Jenna Spinelle As per usual, and I pulled out a couple of things that I thought we could talk about just to reorient ourselves and our listeners as we head into a new election cycle, a new semester academic year for all of us. And the first thing is, the first Republican primary debate was held. As we record this on August 29, about a week ago, it’ll be just about two weeks by the time this episode comes out, and there have been countless takes about who did well, or not so well, and all of that. So I don’t really want to focus us on that. But instead, I know the first thing that caught my eye when I saw the stage itself was that it read democracy 2024. And I would just love to know what you all think about that. Does Fox News and the people on the debate stage they are Republican candidates? Are they thinking about democracy the same way we are? Or if not, what is behind it? What does that say to you that it was so front and center literally at the debate?

Chris Beem I was kind of surprised to see that side to be honest with you. Because what I hear at least well, more frequently than defensive democracy. Is this Republican saying, well, we’re not a democracy. We’re a republic. And you know, you expect to hear this from from the flakes of the world like Lauren Bobet. But Senator Mike Lee, Senator Ted Cruz, this is not an a fringe characterization among among Republicans. And let me just stipulate That’s wrong. That’s a dumb thing to say. There. You know, it’s like saying, it’s not a cracker. It’s a saltine. But it’s so so it’s nonsense, but it’s also pernicious nonsense, I think. And so if we’re not a democracy, will what do we care about efforts to make our democracy better or worse? You know, it’s basically not our concern, because we’re a republic. And so I was, like I said, I was surprised. And maybe that’s a little pushback from the RNC. I don’t know. But it was, it was a surprise. And I think, you know, I’m glad to see it.

Michael Berkman A couple thoughts on that I, you know, it’s an election. And so, you know, from, from anybody’s perspective, even if you think of the country as a republic, rather than a democracy, it is Republic, then elections are central to it. But what does strike me to the extent that I was watching the debate, or what I what I see on Fox News is that, you know, so this is a network that was sued, and had to pay a great deal of money because of election denialism. And so they’re cautious about that now, but at no point have I did they talk about on that stage? Or have I seen evidence that Fox talks about why election denialism is dangerous to democracy, how what they were doing was hurtful to democracy, not just hurtful to their own bottom line. I also just to just to respond to a crusade, on the mood of the nation poll, when we ask people what they value about democracy, we often get this response from conservatives, especially older conservatives, we’re a republic, not a democracy. I wouldn’t say we don’t get it from a majority of Republicans, but we get it from a not insignificant percentage. And I we look at that statement a little bit differently. We don’t necessarily think it’s dumb. We think that what they’re doing is expressing a concern with democratic rule with mob rule, in their own words, but certainly in majority rule, and I think it’s because they recognize that, you know, within the conservative movement, that they’re increasingly a shrinking part of the electorate, and they’re threatened by newly empowered groups, and they and so they want to emphasize that we’re not a democracy, but rather this republic, which, which we have always taken to mean and our interpretation of it goes back to Robert Dahl’s interpretation of it that this phrase captures the idea that there is a fear of mob rule of majority rule, and that goes back to the Federalist Papers, right? That was Madison.

Chris Beem Well, he’s talking about Athens. Right. And so that’s the one government in the history of democracies, that was actually a direct democracy. And that was 2500 years ago. So I mean, I actually think that the the issue is that they’re trying to legitimize the two most undemocratic dimensions of our government, which is the Electoral College, and the two senators for each date. And they are they are APA, politically undemocratic, and they’re not going anywhere. And, and they usually end at least recently, they end up benefiting Republican candidates. So they want to justify that ideologically.

Candis Watts Smith  But so just to dovetail on that point, Chris, is that one thing that I can say that conservatives are very good at, is CO opting particular concepts for their own meaning and purpose, defining them as they see fit. So for example, voter integrity when people are talking about voter ID or early voting or mail in ballots, and why we would want to, you know, raise the bar for people to actually cast their ballot. Some people will call this voter integrity, which sounds great. Democracy is also a word that sounds great. So this is very much in that pattern. I think the other thing that stands out to me or stood out to me, was the extent to which a group of people who say they love the Constitution, have policies and agendas that seem very anti. And so one of them, for example, is Vivek Rama, swamis idea that we should raise the voting age to, you know, your mid 20s, or something like that. Right. So this is a way to cut out a large portion of the population. Or as another example, both kind of Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, essentially kind of talking about federalizing policies that they say, like, that are supposed to be at the state. So which is it? Are we doing federalism? Or are we doing national politics where one particular party that is indeed shrinking? gets to say, what’s good for everyone? Right? So it’s very much moving away from local politics and states rights. And for these kind of overarching, let’s make the united states Florida kind of things. So I find it laughable that this kind of talk about lauding the Constitution and loving democracy are, this is the kind of that what we get, when we unpack it, we see that, that neither of these things are truly valued among these candidates.

Chris Beem You know, I had to just just to put a point on that just about every question that you asked, Jenna, I could like just summarize up with Talk is cheap. And you know, I mean, say you love democracy. Well, okay. But actions speak louder than words. So anyway,

Michael Berkman Well, I think we shouldn’t confuse democracy and the Constitution. The Constitution is a pretty undemocratic to che document. And that’s my point about Republic not a democracy in part. I mean, the Constitution is littered with provisions to try to protect not against direct democracy, but against majority rule in general. I mean, the Electoral College, we talked about Senate, we could go on and on. I mean, there were all kinds of restrictions built in there intended to No, just the whole creation of a Republicans sort of elite that would emerge through their filtering system of multiple elections, you know, having the state legislators vote for the senators and, and state legislators, picking the electors, and on and on, they wanted to remove things from the people as much as they possibly could. And they certainly I mean, Ramaswamy, in particular, has a shaky notion of the Constitution. And in general terms, he’s, he’s often sort of tossing things out there that have nothing to do with the Constitution. And I don’t even think he understands exactly when it when it was written. What we’re most alarmed me, though, Canada’s line in line with some of the things that you were talking about was, I think that some of them were talking about bombing Mexico, or maybe just putting heads on stakes at the border and using the military at the border. These are things that I don’t know if these are against the Constitution, necessarily. They’re certainly against the law. So there seem to be, they’re playing to the audience.

Jenna Spinelle And speaking of that, you know, we were chatting before we started recording about the growing number of voters who identify as independent. Now they may still vote Republican, or vote for Republican candidates. But I wonder what that says to all of you about the notion of a primary. And I’m sure there’s something similar on the Democratic side, as well. You know, we’ve talked on the show before about primaries tending to attract the extremes of the party in terms of voters. And I just wonder with seemingly more and more people, and more and more younger people identifying as independent does the system need to change to catch up with that? Or is it going to lead to the candidates that are selected through the primary process, perhaps being out of step when it comes to the general election?

Candis Watts Smith  So this is really tricky, because it’s even hard to say, the primary system, because it’s different in every place. So in Pennsylvania, you have to choose a party. And if you’re independent, you may not vote in the party. And so then we could see how independents can be locked out of that situation. In the product, Carolina, you can identify as an independent, but you must choose a party to vote in the primaries. And I wonder, I guess I haven’t I mean, this is a empirical question is do we get very different types of candidates out of the two types of systems, one where independents are locked out? And another way they’re not?

Michael Berkman I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything compelling that that is true, although it seems like it should be. Right, because the people voting in primaries are the most extreme members of each party, the Republican primary electorate is quite different from the electorate, that’s likely to vote for Republican candidates in 2024, for example, they’re just far more committed to Donald Trump, they’re far more conservative on some of their policies. And they do nominate some rather extreme candidates, you know, I think that the polarization from whatever the sources are the primaries or whatever, whatever is driving the polarization. And I believe it’s multiple factors. It’s been happening for a very, very long time. But I think the polarization does drive many young people in particular into calling themselves Independents. Because the one one thing that polarization does force you to do, and this is what tougher for a younger voter coming into the political system that it is for somebody who has been in it for a while, is you have to choose between two drastically different alternatives. And that might not be a two drastically different alternatives who seem to hate each other. And that might not be something that’s appealing to too many of them. I’m not the first person to come up with this. But I do think that’s part of what’s driving the rise of independence. And as more of these young people come into the electorate, we’re going to see the number of independents continuing to increase

Chris Beem The impact of that is going to be is that it’s going to further diminish the power of parties, which we’ve talked about being on issue and problem in terms of gatekeeping and and setting norms for behavior and expectations, things like that.

Michael Berkman Right. I mean, that’s what strikes me about the Republican Party right now is the complete abandonment of the role of gatekeepers, you know, so you mentioned Republicans and Democrats, the Democratic Party is operating as a gatekeeper traditionally has, I don’t think they’re holding primaries, in many states. Certainly, they are making it as difficult as they possibly can, for anybody to come in and oppose Joe Biden, because they’re playing gatekeeper. But the Republicans, I mean, the idea that a political party would nominate for president, somebody who is under indictment in four different cases, and is going to be out on bail, as Christie likes to bring up and maybe even is convicted. By that point, is just mind blowing. Like a political party doesn’t do that, as we traditionally think of the Republican Party, because the job of a political party more than anything, is to win elections. That is a reason for existing traditionally, as we thought about them, they exist to find candidates run them and win. Yet they know that running somebody who is in the situation that Trump is going to be in IS, IS is not going to go well for them. But they seem incapable of playing any kind of gatekeeping role on this. Got to kind of free for all and everything’s being driven by Donald Trump or letting it happen.

Chris Beem You know, we’ve seen this this show before. Yeah.

Michael Berkman Right. Mitch McConnell could have stopped the whole thing. I mean, if you think of Mitch McConnell, as sort of the leader of the establishment leader of the Republican Party, he could have stopped it. He could have stopped it in the second impeachment. Instead, he came out and he said, we’re gonna let the criminal justice system do this. We’re not going to do it this way. That was exactly what he said, Well, let’s move to the criminal justice system. And you can see all the respect that many Republican leaders are giving to the criminal justice system now that they’ve got Donald Trump in their clutches, but all he had to do was vote for impeachment. And that was it.

Chris Beem But you notice how silent Mitch McConnell has been over the last two months. But the other thing is, I mean, I’m quite confident that he thought he could have his cake and eat it too.

Michael Berkman American institutions, including the judicial system, are being routinely torn apart by many Republican elites. And very few of them, including Mitch McConnell, are standing up for them and saying, Look, we have a process. We’re now in that process. In fact, when I voted to not impeach him, I said it’s removed to the process. So we have to respect the process, we have to see what happens. We have to believe in the integrity of the system. He’s not doing that. And by the admission, what he’s doing is he’s allowing all these voices to adjust. Now, right now, we know that American public opinion, we’ve done polling on this as shifted, especially among Republicans strongly against the FBI, it’s strongly against the Justice Department in general, whatever the resolution of these cases now, right, the juries have been vilified, even before they’re chosen. Even before any of this happens. They have made sure that nobody will trust or at least people on the Republican side, many of them will not trust the system. So Mitch McConnell, silence is not to me, okay. His silence is going along with this, because he’s got responsibility. He’s the Senate Minority Leader. He’s a leading Republican establishment figure. I can’t think of anybody else. Who would who has that role book, Kevin McCarthy, but he doesn’t have you know, Kevin McCarthy has a totally different kind of thing. He, he does everything he can to decimate America, right?

Chris Beem No, I can’t argue with any of that. But none of this is new. Right. This is this is why are we 16?

Jenna Spinelle I mean, what is maybe new? And Michael, you started to mention this before is the is the Republican Party being becoming more and more one of those institutions that conservatives or Republicans are turning against? And what happens if that is indeed, the case? The incentive, as you said, has traditionally been to win elections. But are there other incentives that might knock that down from first place, so to speak, and

Michael Berkman Well, to me there, it’s the sort of attachment of the Republican Party to one person, as an instrument of that person. And to the extent that they’re not an instrument to that person, then they’re disposable to and I mean, I suspect and eager to hear from others to that, you know, as the thing plays itself down, and if Donald Trump starts to sort of crumble as I continue to believe he will, then that party is going to go to war with itself, as you already saw, at the debate, some policy routes about which there’s going to be really serious conflict within the Republican Party, over Ukraine, and especially when the funding bill comes up in the Republican House, where I think they’re probably going to vote against continued funding for Ukraine, and then the Senate is not going to be very happy with that. But you saw between pans, and Nikki Haley, right, and then Ramaswamy and some of the others, I think, I think there are real policy conflicts within that party, probably in a lot of other areas, as well, but they’re also around just this devotion to one person.

Candis Watts Smith  I would like to talk a little bit about that. So I was asked by a journalist why I thought that the question was, why isn’t DeSantis doing as well, as we thought and the questions that were posed to me around were around rhetoric. And I said that I actually think that that’s not the issue that we’re kind of in this moment where we are seeing a thing that maybe we haven’t seen before, which is kind of loyalty to an individual. And, you know, I think about, I remember when there was a shirt, someone bought me a shirt with Obama’s face on it. And I thought that was so weird, because I’m like, Oh, that’s not something that we do in the States. Like that’s something that other people do in non democratic countries to kind of focus on a particular human person. And I wonder to what extent we’re just not even tapping into this idea of loyalty because it’s not something that we’ve seen it. We haven’t seen it this way. And we don’t really seem to have language around it.

Michael Berkman I have that thought around the flags. Like I never remember flags before. For candidates, these, especially flags that are bigger than the house that they’re in front of, with Trump’s name on them and, and is there something really, you know, it’s kind of a cult of personality, and that’s that’s a dangerous thing, especially if the party He is a part of that. Right? Which very clearly seems to be.

Chris Beem It’s a manifestation of connecting a political leader intimately to one’s own identity. It’s not just a partisan choice. It’s not just an expression of opinion. It’s, this is who I am. And the fact that you, you can also do it in a way where you are thumbing your nose at everybody who doesn’t like it. That’s the other advantage to doing that. But yeah, I noticed that I mean, I canvass Robotham. I gave him money. And the I, you know, I put a sign in my yard and that was it. Right? That was it. But that’s not what’s going on here. And I really have tried to try to figure out what it is that accounts for this difference. And I think that’s it that is to be a Trump supporter is to attach one’s own sense of purpose, meaning value identity directly to that person, which is not a good recipe.

Candis Watts Smith  I guess my and I guess my question is, is have we ever seen this in our history?

Michael Berkman We’ve seen demagogues, we I don’t know that we’ve ever seen quite like this.

Chris Beem Not like this. I mean, you know, Roosevelt was president for what, 10 years for elections. I remember people saying, Yeah, Joe Lewis was always the champ the Yankees were always had world series champion. And Roosevelt was always the president. But that’s about as far as it went. It was never I don’t know, at least I don’t recall it being this kind of identification.

Michael Berkman You know, with Lindbergh, maybe with Father Coughlin, maybe even with George Wallace. But in all of those cases, parties played the role of gatekeeper they kept them out. Right. And, you know, this is this is really one of the really important insights from that how democracies die. That responsibility has been abdicated. So you get here, maybe, Jen a good time to transition to the indictments.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah, I was, I was going to actually. So I want to again, there’s so much changing. And, you know, I don’t want to get too bogged down in the weeds of every single indictment, I’m sure our listeners have sort of kept up with with some of that. But I want to instead focus us on an op ed that Jessica Hughes men from vote beat who was a guest on the show, last fall, she covers election administration, at the local level, and the people who make elections run and work. I’m just going to read a few lines of this, and I’ll link the whole thing in the show notes. But she says, I don’t have to tell you that an indictment won’t solve these problems. I also don’t have to tell you that things are likely to get worse before they get better. The push for hand counting paper ballots, the angry battles over control of elections, the rampant abuse of public records requests by bad faith actors. And the baseless lawsuits that demand so much taxpayer money are ongoing proof that his message meaning Trump’s message is still resonating. So I think it’s it’s tempting to see that yeah, you know, on one hand, Trump’s finally maybe going to get what so many people hope is coming to him. But yet there’s these other things that have already happened. And we’re going into another election with a workforce that is, at best burned out, if not left the public service or moved on to something else, because they’re getting threats. And, you know, just all as Jessica says, all these things that make it difficult, if not impossible to do their job. So I wonder how you all kind of square those things, and maybe how our listeners should think about squaring those two things like Trump being going through the justice process, but also the effects that, you know, what he is accused of doing seems to have already caused.

Chris Beem I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I think I’m less pessimistic than Jessica is. But you know, I don’t want to sound like do justice of the heavens fall. But I’m not far from that. I you know, I just the rule of laws, the rule of law. And I, you know, I’m absolutely certain that things might get worse. But I am even more certain that the alternative of doing nothing of establishing a two tier system of justice is absolutely and and categorically worse. And so that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.

Candis Watts Smith 

Well, let me just say we already have a two tier system of the criminal legal system, but not this way.

Chris Beem I mean, yes, we do. But the idea that a president we’re not we’re just going to let that go. You’re Write? Of course, that’s right. But it doesn’t change what’s at stake in this in this choice.

Michael Berkman I think Huseman is kind of mixing two things up together. And it’s a bit of a red herring. So nobody ever said that these indictments are the criminal justice system going after what happened on around the 2020 election was going to fix the problems with our democracy. And that’s not the job of the Justice Department. That’s not what they do. Right. They take write cases, and then they prosecute them and then judges judge them and, and democracies do this with former leaders all the time. There’s nothing new here in terms of democracies is not like, you know, the end of the democracy that we’re prosecuting a former president,

Chris Beem It’s happened in the phrase for us, we’ve never done it.

Michael Berkman But it is not an eight. It is not an undemocratic action. It’s happened in South Korea. It’s happened in men. It’s happened in Italy happened in other hands, it’s happened in Italy, right? So it’s happened in other places, once somebody leaves the office there, they’re just a citizen. And they’re liable to the justice system, which is treating him I think, quite nicely right now relative to the severity of the crimes. The other issue has to do with the ongoing threat to democracy from the perversion of our elections, in particular, along the lines of what happened in 2020. was putting the details aside was an effort to subvert the will of the people in multiple states. You know, one of the things that I was working on during my sabbatical was at my colleague, Michael Nelson, and I hear we’re working with folks at State United, who some of our listeners may remember was on the show last year, and one our brown metal, and we’ve been sort of cataloging very carefully precedents of election deniers and state legislatures. And so for example, in Pennsylvania, well over half the Republicans, well over half of the Republicans in the state legislature continue to deny that Joe Biden won Pennsylvania and won the election in 2020. And we know from other guests we’ve had from things we talked about this kind of election denialism. This is dangerous. This is a dangerous SOS to really be getting involved. We also know there has been all kinds of machinations in terms of the people that supervise elections in various states, changes in the laws, removing local control, all kinds of things like that. So whether or not we have disaster coming, I certainly hope not we require vigilance, continued vigilance on what’s going on. Because we we continue to have a highly decentralized system of elections in this country, where we allow states who are under the political control of people that don’t acknowledge even the last election, that they have the control over the election. So I think that is continued concern, a continued threat, something that needs to continue to be monitored. I’m not really sure what it has to do with Donald Trump, other than it is important that it be transparent. What happened last time, and the only way to achieve that transparency is going to be through the courts, or at least an important way to achieve that transparency is going to be through the courts. It came through the January 6 committee, but for half the country that was devalued, right? Oh, those were the Democrats. Now it’s going to come out of the courts. And that’s why there’s such an effort to devalue the courts as well. Because we can’t that way, we don’t have to accept what comes out of the way  and by come out of the courts.

Candis Watts Smith  You’re talking about Trump’s cases?

Michael Berkman Well, principally. But I also think you see what I’m really fascinated by the Georgia case. And not not actually because Donald Trump is at the top of it, but because of the people at the bottom of it. Because what the what the Georgia case does is show at the state level where these things go on what happened to steal an election. And so you’ve got the harassment, the utter harassment of these two election workers, right, that was perpetrated by people in Georgia and people from outside Georgia, in Georgia, that’s a Georgia State Crime, it should be tried there. You also have, you know, these fake electors, they’re prosecuting them in Michigan, because that was a Michigan plot, it should be prosecuted in Georgia to should probably be prosecuted in Arizona as well. These are state and there were other pieces of it as well. So it’s not just Donald Trump standing at the top, which of course, is what Jack Smith is all about with his case, and why he streamlines it the way that he did. But what I like about the George, because I think it’s important is it shows what can happen within the state, if there’s a concerted effort to steal an election. And you know, what bothers me a little bit about Jack Smith’s approach, although I understand why he’s doing it, I think is it feels a little bit like the January 6 committee to me, which largely coming from Liz Cheney, made itself all about Donald Trump, that this was Donald Trump. But what the Georgia case does are so no, this was the Georgia Republican Party. Again, case shows this was the Michigan Republican Party. Hmm. And I think it’s really important since that’s where elections are run. Okay, you got me on a soapbox on that.

Chris Beem The only thing I would say is that I think what is indispensable if this is to go well, or at least not terribly is for the judges and the prosecutor, prosecutors to conduct themselves with probity to conduct themselves with rectitude, and a sense of gravitas associated that’s appropriate to this level of indictment. And from where I sit, they have been I have seen, you know, I’m not a lawyer, but I have been impressed with their ability to wade through this chaos and and just say, This is my courtroom. And we’re going to do it this way, because this is the right way. And if there’s anything else, I think it just undermines the kind of the one shot we have of getting through this. Well. And so, I mean, so far, I think that just speaks well to what could happen.

Michael Berkman I mean, there’s nothing to disagree with there. But I’m struck by the fact that these federal prosecutors and judges who have for the most part acted with probity and professionalism, and all that are attacked is basically fascist pigs by Donald Trump, and nobody in the Republican Party with the exception of the Never Trump errs, who are no longer part of the Republican Party stand up and say, No, they’re not. They’re acting with profanity, because this is how the court system works. This is what bothers me about Mitch McConnell’s silence, as well as out of so many others that it’s not all but you know, it shouldn’t just be Chris Christie out there talking about how, you know, this is how the system works.

Chris Beem Well, we just had a conversation with Tim Miller, where we kind of go into some of the, some of the reasons for for this complete, cowardice, moral cowardice.

Jenna Spinelle We’re gonna have to leave it there. And it’s so good to have all of you back. I’m looking forward to getting back into our regular flow of episodes. Were going to stay bi weekly as we were in the spring, and lots of good stuff coming your way. So for the entire democracy works team. I’m Jenna Spinelle. Thanks for listening.