--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hi, I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is a special series from Apple News Today, all about the 2022 midterm elections.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Over the next five weeks, we are going to examine what matters to voters, how the former president and the current one are impacting the elections, how we even got to this moment, and ultimately, how these elections could help shape the future of the democratic process.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There is so much at stake this November, and it's not just the balance of power in Washington. There is still a widespread belief among most Republican voters that the 2020 election was stolen. That claim is false and has been disproven over and over.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But most people of both parties believe that our democracy is in crisis, albeit for very different reasons. 80% of Americans say the country is more divided than ever, with two-thirds in a recent CBS News poll saying they fear more political violence is coming.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: My first guest today is Julian Zelizer. He's a historian at Princeton University and the author and editor of nearly two dozen books spanning decades of American political history.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He says that for all the strains that our country has gone through, from the Civil War to the Great Depression to the tense battles during the Civil Rights era, this moment is yet again testing the strength of our democracy.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's fragile. It's weak. Our democracy, I think, is struggling at this point. Anytime you're having conversations about overturning elections and denying the results of elections, the democracy is not doing well.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I wanted to start off by talking with Zelzer because he has to do the hard work of putting current events into historical context, even while they're happening.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So I asked how this moment stacks up against other moments of turmoil throughout our history.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: It's different and it's as bad as some of the earlier times and not quite as bad, but still dangerous. Meaning you can look at the history of the country and obviously you can look at the Civil War and say, well, at least we're not there.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And that's true. That is the ultimate breakdown of the democracy. Or you could look to a period like the 1960s and say, look how divisive our politics can get. And look how bad our leaders can become. Vietnam, Watergate, etc.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: But I think that kind of history just shows that this is a really kind of delicate and uncertain project that we are embarked on.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And so when we are in one of these moments where lots of things are hitting the system all at once, the lesson is take it seriously because it can get a lot worse.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And certainly, I think we're in one of the worst places. It's not a civil war, but we've seen a normalization of so many problems that almost are seeming routine that we don't notice them or we don't feel an urgency to deal with them, that that's not a healthy kind of set of conditions for the government to work or the politics to work.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. And so I'm curious how you think we actually got to this moment.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Since the 1970s, we've seen kind of problematic developments in campaign finance.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: We had this period in the 70s, we tried to reform the system after Watergate. In 1974, Congress passes reform. Some of those reforms work, but over time, we've seen interest groups really kind of learn how to play the system.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: We've seen just floods of money go into politics, and we end up with Supreme Court decision that allows this to happen, we are in a place where private money has just immense power over political decision making.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: So that's a big structural development. But then we have another side of how did we get here when I think you've seen in the Republican Party a genuine radicalization of a party take place before our eyes.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: I date it back to the 1980s with the rise of figures like Newt Gingrich.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But we see a party that doesn't see guardrails to what you're allowed or not allowed to do.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: So it's a combination of these big changes in how politics works to decisions that parties and leaders have made.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In 2020, Julian Zelizer wrote a book all about Newt Gingrich and the introduction of what he calls the new Republican Party.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He argues that to understand the rise of Trump, you have to start with Gingrich.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: He is an ambitious Republican from Georgia, and Gingrich's ascendance to House Speaker really pushed the limitations of Washington.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And it helped turn politics into even more of a bloodsport.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And also provided a template for how Republicans could get media attention.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Here's how Mark Rosenberg, a former Gingrich aide, described his tactics in a PBS Frontline documentary from the 90s.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Gingrich learned that the easiest way for someone to get access to the news media was to be controversial, and in particular to be quotable.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And so from the very beginning of his stay in Washington, he was quotably controversial.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Well Gingrich is coming into politics in the 1970s and 80s He part of a generation of Republicans that was pretty desperate Republicans had been out of power in Congress since the 1950s
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And Gingrich, in particular, is someone who reaches the conclusion that Republicans essentially have to do anything to win.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And that means all these norms that are so important in Washington at the time, bipartisanship, civility, Gingrich says, get rid of all that.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Say what you have to say, destroy whoever you have to destroy, take any political process and weaponize it and forget about other concerns.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Don't worry about governing. Don't worry about the health of democracy.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And he was really a pivotal figure because lots of people say stuff like that, including elected officials.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: But what's different, he rises in power. He becomes ultimately the speaker of the Republican Party.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: So he helps to legitimate this kind of thinking, this new vision of partisanship, meaning just ruthless, no guardrails partisanship as a party position.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Gingrich and Trump were allies in the 2016 election, even at moments when some others in the party had turned their back on Trump.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: At one point, Trump even considered Gingrich as a possible running mate.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: I'll tell you one thing, folks. I'm not saying it's Newt. But if it's Newt, nobody's going to be beating him in those debates. That's for sure.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Zelizer says Gingrich's prominence is an incredibly pivotal point on the timeline if we're to understand the rise of not just Trump, but the current Republican Party.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can just look at the period in the 50s and 60s, where obviously you had extremism. In the Republican Party, you had Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, who many people think was a predecessor of a lot of this.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But he doesn't ultimately become a party leader. He's actually, in the end, kind of purged from those inter-party circles.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And the difference with what we've seen in recent decades is that kind of politics has risen to the very top of political power.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In 2016, we saw this most clearly with the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: At Princeton, Zelizer works with a bunch of scholars to make historical assessments of each president.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Earlier this year, they released their assessment of Trump. And they argued, quote, Trump was not the cause of the political divisions that defined his term in office, but rather was a product of long-term trends in Republican politics and American polarization more broadly.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's an attempt to say first when you look at the trump presidency there's obvious reasons to say wow we just haven't seen that as we record this the former president said in an interview that he can essentially think something is declassified and that means it's disclassified and statements like that are not what we've heard from presidents or some of the tweets that happened when he was in the Oval Office.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It wasn't the kind of rhetoric that even the most hardened partisan like a Richard Nixon would ever have used.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But it came from somewhere. There was a reason that he became the nominee.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There was a reason that even as he did all of this, most Republicans were okay with it and their support did not diminish.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's a reason when even as a former president, he's under multiple investigations, unlike anything we've seen, his support seems to be stronger in the Republican Party.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So I argue that you need to understand how has the Republican Party changed before 2016 to explain why they were in a position to host, essentially, the Trump presidency and to support it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You have to understand how did communications and the media change to really understand why did his tactics work politically in terms of shaping the narrative of the news and getting the information he wanted out there.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But he took some of the perils of the moment. He exploited them. He capitalized on them. But he took them to such new levels, he basically was unbound.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And he didn't care about the consequences of exploiting those problems.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And so it put us in a new place where now there's a precedent for future presidents or political leaders in Congress to use those same tactics.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I want to talk also, you mentioned that the Republican Party changed before 2016. And, you know, sort of infamously now in 2012, there was this audit or autopsy, as it was, of the Republican Party and its fortunes in presidential elections after Obama had won his second term.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And, you know, one of the huge takeaways was demographics are such that they are really, really favoring Democrats at the moment, and Republicans therefore need to change the way that they communicate to a lot of those voters.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And Trump sort of seemed to have flipped that on its head.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Well, part of it, those autopsies, those predictions underestimated the power of anti institutions that we have discussed And those are all in place They not going anywhere
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And so a party that doesn necessarily broaden its reach might still win, especially if it can retain total loyalty from its constituency, which Republicans and certainly President Trump was generally able to do.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Red didn't turn blue. red stayed red in most cases and so when you have that and you have the electoral college and the filibuster all those demographic predictions might not be as accurate as we think
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And the second which was a warning at the time is you don't know how constituencies are going to kind of be one decade two decades later and there's some signs that the former president was able to bring some parts of the Latino community, for example, into the Republican coalition.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And the fact is, we just don't know white working class voters whose economic interests don't align with a lot of Republican policy, liked what he had to say on culture and liked what he represented.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And he found a way to keep them exactly where they were.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: So demography isn't actually destiny all the time in politics. Institutions matter a lot and people's identity can change.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Okay. So we can move on from the future for a moment and talk about the present.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You have done these assessments of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump. Joe Biden, of course, is now in office.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Does his election change your view of the pathway that the country was on in all of these assessments that you've worked on?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Certainly to me, and I think to some of my authors and a lot of analysts, is he's managed to pass President Biden a lot of legislation, which seemed impossible, frankly, from even the moment he took office.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And I know there was a lot of enthusiasm. You had finally Democratic Congress, but I think for a lot of hardened analysts, everyone, including myself, looked at very narrow majorities, the power of Republican opposition.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And yet he's found ways to get a lot of bills through.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I mean, some of the things that had been broken under President Trump, such as international alliances, which have been front and center in Ukraine in a remarkable way.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He's found ways to bring diplomacy back very quickly and to make alliances a centerpiece of national security.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And so for me, and I think a lot of others, they'll kind of be part of his presidency to wrestle with how this happened.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And he even found Republican support in a few areas, tepid, but he found a little of it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But that goes against the narrative.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: So I think those are really important and relevant things that don't necessarily fit the main arguments that have been made about the past few years.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Does that tell you anything about the strength of institutions at all that it is possible if they do get degraded in one presidency that they can return in some way, shape or form in the next?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: A little bit. I mean, I'm still on the side where I am struck by how much they can break down.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: I guess I started my career with an assumption of their strength and vitality.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And what's been remarkable the longer I've been in this and the longer I watch is how easily they can be broken.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So in some ways, I expect them to be strong. The Constitution is a very robust system.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And this system of federalism and separation of powers, it's very elaborate.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: It was remarkable to me is how with President Trump, for example, you could just ignore things and do whatever you want.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And there isn't any kind of pushback.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So kind of Biden going back to some semblance of normal or some more stability isn't so much of a surprise, but it doesn't necessarily restore the confidence because we can see all around it, all these elements that are very dangerous and are front and center as much as his ability to govern as what we would call a more traditional president.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. And to that end, our country is facing unprecedented threats.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 69% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans said that democracy was, quote, in danger of collapse.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Both of those sides have very different reasons as to why.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But I guess the question that's on my mind is whether democracy is sustainable in a country where we are not all sharing the same realities?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: That's a really tough question.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: At the most fundamental level, no. I mean, democracies can survive bitter division.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: I think democracies can survive really robust debate.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: We saw this. I mean, look, I studied the 60s a lot of the time and the intensity of the fighting over Vietnam, over race relations, over other culture, was as intense as anything we see today.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And our democracy endured.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: We've had some very good moments. I think many people in both parties frankly would argue And it didn break down after that
--:-- Julian Zelizer: But now this danger is we don even really know what happening Or a lot of people are fundamentally disagreeing over the basic facts
--:-- Julian Zelizer: That makes democracy hard because you have no common foundation.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So I often tell students, you know, in the 60s, you have these very heated debates over Vietnam.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And what should we do? Should we be there? Should we withdraw troops? Should we bomb more? Whatever.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There were debates that were on the streets of this country every day.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Today, I would imagine like you'd have the debate being, are we even in Vietnam?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: With some people saying, well, we're not there. Nothing's actually happening, even as body bags come back right in front of our eyes.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And if you're in that space, how can a political leader lead the country in a direction?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: How could even leaders of different parties form those difficult compromises that are necessary for legislation?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: You can't do it because they see different worlds on issues like the climate or issues now like an election outcome.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah, and it makes it difficult to ask this and sort of think about this.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But are there lessons then that we can draw upon historically to perhaps see a brighter future, given what you just said, given that we don't even have 100% shared facts?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Yeah. I mean, look, you can think of the shift from the 19th century to the 20th century.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: The 19th century, you still had a press that was dominated by partisan newspapers.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Literally, they were owned by the parties. They were run by the parties.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: The information was meant to ensure party victory.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And for all its flaws, for much of the 20th century, we had better journalism.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: We had journalism where reporters, they weren't totally objective, but they tried to be.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: They believed that should be the professional norm.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: You had really high-quality columnists and newspapers like the New York Times or Walter Cronkite, who for all their flaws were providing pretty good news.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And so there you could see we moved from worse to better.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And in terms of other elements of democracy, I would go back to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or parts of Reconstruction, where we took really broken elements where people were disenfranchised, where the forces of reaction and anti-democratic forces had been winning, and we reversed it.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: You know, when Congress votes and Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, that's a historic victory for improving our democracy and making our democracy real.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I want to close this conversation by invoking a phrase that we hear so often now that it feels like it's trite, that, you know, this election is the most important of our lifetimes.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We've, you know, heard it for years and years now.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But how are you viewing the importance of what happens in November?
--:-- Julian Zelizer: I think if we move in a direction where many election deniers win office and the outcome is read as legitimating January 6th rather than negating what January 6th was about, that means we're in a worse place.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: And that means we're heading in a path where it becomes harder and harder to fix the problems we've discussed.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And so I don't know if it's the most important election ever. We never know, really.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And we don't know for sure. until the consequences become clear.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But I think those questions being front and center in the midterms and then in 2024 make this extraordinarily important, not just for one party over the other party, but for the health of this system that we are all part of.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Julian Zelizer, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
--:-- Julian Zelizer: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Julian Zelizer is a historian at Princeton University and the author and editor of nearly two dozen books on American political history.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Next week, my conversation with Amy Gardner, a reporter on The Washington Post's democracy team.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: She's been writing about the rise of election deniers, candidates who still refuse to accept the results of the last presidential election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It shows how much the lie about the 2020 election has completely taken over the Republican Party, how it has become a price of admission for many races in this country.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That is next week on Election 2022, a special series all about the midterms from Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I'll talk to you then.
