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Podcast: America vs itself: Political scientist Francis Fukuyama on the state of democracy
Listen: In this edition of the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer speaks with Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama about the state of democracy worldwide and here in the US. 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy, and nowhere more so than here at home. A quarter of Americans believe that the FBI was behind January 6. But as the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” But today, in America, we cannot agree on basic facts. On this note, Fukuyama joins Bremmer to discuss the global and domestic threats to democracy.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
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Top US national security threat: the myth of the stolen election
David Sanger knows a thing or two about national security. After all, it's his beat at the New York Times.
So what does he think is the biggest threat to America's national security right now?
An "insider threat" to the stability of the election system coming not from Russia, not from China, and not from North Korea. The biggest menace is Americans willing to engage in political violence, Sanger tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US threat levels from foreign and domestic enemies
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"Defund the FBI" is the new "stop the steal"
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and want to spend just a couple of moments on the FBI heading into Mar-a-Lago, the resident of former President Trump just yesterday. Absolutely unprecedented news, something we haven't seen before in US history. Trump came out and immediately said, "Nothing like this has happened against a President before." And that is true. He is a unique President in many ways, and that has seen unique consequences, both in terms of the events of January 6th and two impeachments that succeeded in the House and then failed to convict. All of that is unprecedented.
Impeachment has become truly failed as a political mechanism. That is also new in the United States. And now we have the FBI heading into his home and taking boxes and boxes of classified documents out of the safe. Now, legally, we don't have much real information yet, and we probably won't for some time. We don't know what's in the safe. We don't know exactly what the case is that is being argued. We do know the Department of Justice would've had to make a strong argument to get a judge to approve a warrant as opposed to just going for a subpoena for the information. And I'm no lawyer and I have no idea to judge the merits of the case that the judge him or herself would've had to make that decision on so we're going to have to wait to make a reasonable and useful judgment there.
And those political figures that are coming out immediately in saying it's a witch hunt and it's weaponization of the FBI when, by the way, the head of the FBI today, Christopher Wray, was appointed by Trump and nobody has quit over these investigations, and there have been no leaks that have suggested they are in any way untoward. All of that is partisan BS. It's not credible. It's just point scoring. So if that's a legal side where everything seems to be above board and legit, we have no basis to make judgements about the case itself at this point. Politically, it's a very different matter. Politically, of course, we are going to see two very different worldviews where those that are supporters of Trump will be incredibly strongly opposed and view this as a witch hunt and view the FBI and the DOJ as partisan and directly acting on the orders of President Biden, again, despite the fact that there's no credible information that yet in any way points to that.
But I do think that politically, this is going to strengthen Trump in the Republican Party, strengthen with his base, and also strengthen those leaders of the Republican Party, his support from them who really don't want him to be the next nominee, but are stuck with him at this point. Let's keep in mind, it's the opposite of what had been happening over the last few months with fewer people showing up at his rallies, with less media attention, with January 6th and the hearings going on in the House and Fox and others deciding not to even cover them and not really talking about them. The narrative was on one side politically with the Democratic Party and the very few never-Trumpers among Republican leadership. And now you have this need for everyone on the Republican Party to rally behind and around Trump and say, "This is a witch hunt and this is unacceptable."
And that's just as true for Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader in the House as it is for Ron DeSantis, who clearly does not want Trump to be the nominee. DeSantis wants to be the nominee, but he now has to say, "This is unacceptable and we need to support Trump." And he's in an impossible position for him, but going after Trump in this environment if you're a Republican is tantamount to being a traitor to your party. So I do think that at least over the course of the next few months as this plays out the ability of Trump to drive a stronger drumbeat to get more people out to support him and out to fight the fight against the Democrats and against Biden and against the FBI and against the rule of law and the institutions in the United States that Trump says is broken. I mean, in many ways, every much the argument that he made with "Stop the Steal," despite there being absolutely no credible evidence that the election was stolen, he now has a new lease on that argument.
"Stop the Steal" was getting old. People didn't want to re-litigate and rehash that unless you were a die-hard Trump loyalist, but now you have the FBI and the DOJ going into Mar-a-Lago and creating this case against the former president. And that's going to be seen as an absolutely equivalent to "the election's fake" and it's going to bring up all of the "Biden should be in prison" and "Hillary should be in prison". And that's what this is all about. It's just partisan, the Democrats going after the former president irrespective. Now, I think it should go without saying that none of this today, none of it could happen in any other advanced industrial democracy in the world. It's conceivable that we would see this in Japan, or Germany, or Canada, Australia, or France, and that is precisely because the United States and its political process, its election system, and the checks and balances by both the legislature and the judiciary on the executive has become massively eroded.
And the perception of the legitimacy of those institutions among the media, which has become almost completely partisan, and among the population, which has been consumed by that media on one side or the other, is far, far greater than we could see in another wealthy democracy. And that goes to show that the US as a democracy really isn't the same as these other countries anymore. It was 30 years ago, 20 years ago. It's not anymore. And that's a challenge, that's a challenge for the Americans to be able to get allies to pay attention and to be aligned and to coordinate. And it's also a problem in the Americans being effective in preventing rogue states and rogue organizations from taking actions globally that undermine the United States and undermine former US led global order. The US is still the most powerful country in the world, but politically it really doesn't have the strength, the ability to lead by example, the values that it's had historically.
My view on all of this is I absolutely want the former president to be indicted if the DOJ believes that he has broken the law. And I would say that about any other former president as well. I certainly do not believe nor have I seen anything credible that implies that Biden has broken the law the way that there are many such instances of Trump. I do believe that "Hunter Biden" should be investigated. I've said it before. I think that the role he's had, not just in Ukraine, but in China, where he was traveling on Air Force Two and using his connections, his relationship with the then vice president to make money out of China absolutely does not pass the ethics test and deserves a full investigation. I felt the same way about Ivanka and all the licenses that she was getting from China while holding an official position in the White House and the daughter of the president at that point of the United States.
I see those things as very equivalent and very problematic, and they should be investigated, but we're not talking about those things. We're talking about the former president of the United States, and I think that's more important. And, frankly, I personally hold that to a higher standard. And so if we have a legal and judicial process that believes that there have been high crimes committed, then absolutely I do not want that former president to be seen as above the law. And my concern is that it's not just about the perception of American legal and judicial institutions having eroded, and they have. It's also the desire for the former president to be above the law that is driving a large number of people that know better to say that this is politicized, that this is not an appropriate following of legal and judicial process, and, that of course, is doing a lot more damage to American democracy.
I expect that there will be violence as a consequence of this. I expect that this will make the upcoming midterm elections uglier and more de-legitimized. And it certainly concerns me a great deal as we get closer to 2024.
So that's what I think about all of this and I hope everyone is getting in a little R&R in the middle of August. No rest for the wicked. And, of course, August never as quiet, quite as you want it to be. Talk to you all real soon.
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Lessons from US midterm primaries in Georgia, Texas, and Alabama
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, discusses Tuesday's primaries.
What happened in Tuesday's primaries?
Several states held primary elections on Tuesday of this week with the most interesting elections in Georgia, Texas, and Alabama. In Georgia, two incumbent Republicans who were instrumental in certifying the results of President Joe Biden's victory in 2020 won the nomination for governor and secretary of state against two Trump-backed opponents. The sitting governor who Trump had been targeting for months over his role in the 2020 election won by over 50 points, a sign that while Republican voters still love Donald Trump, his hold over the party is not absolute. This is going to create an opening for challengers in the 2024 presidential election cycle.
In Alabama, a primary for who will take the seat of retiring Senator Richard Shelby is going to a runoff between Shelby's chosen replacement, his former chief of staff, and a very controversial House member who President Trump had endorsed but then unendorsed when he was thought to be too weak a candidate. He now has a shot at the nomination with a runoff election in June and if he wins, he will be one of the first full throated deniers of Joe Biden's election results to serve in the United States Senate.
In Texas, the most conservative house Democrat, who is a bete noir of progressive activists, again held off a challenge from a progressive activist running to his left. The incumbent had been endorsed by House leadership while his challenger had been endorsed by national progressives like Bernie Sanders. But she was unable to unseat the incumbent in a very Hispanic district. Elsewhere in Texas, a son of the Bush political dynasty lost his race for attorney general to the sitting attorney general, who has recently struggled with ethical problems.
Finally, one of the biggest stories of the night was turnout in Georgia, which broke previous records for midterm primaries, despite worries that had been pushed by Democrats about a new election law that they claim would suppress minority votes. We'll never know the counterfactual, how many people might have voted in the absence of this new law but the fact that the turnout was so high will take some of the political sting over accusations of voter suppression for a lot of new Republican laws that had passed and which several American corporations have reacted to very strongly in the wake of the 2020 election controversy.
January 6th: One year later
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and it is January 6th, one year on, a date that's going to be seared in American consciousness for a long time. And of course, depending on who you are in the United States, a date that has a radically different meaning for you than many of your neighboring Americans. And that of course is precisely why this crisis of democracy has become what it is, that Americans don't agree on what actually happened on the date. Was this seditious behavior, trying to overturn a legitimate election, being exhorted to violence by the former sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump? Or was it a group of patriots trying to ensure that the false certification of a stolen and fraudulent election would not place and ensuring that Trump would be installed as reelected as a legitimate president?
Literally, the country is divided not down the middle, only about 30% of Americans believe in the latter narrative, but it's an enormously disturbing divide. And look, simply by saying this, there are people that are watching this video that are going to disagree with me and say, "how can you say that President Trump called for violence, and this was all BS, and this was a fake insurrection." And I am someone who came out on the day and said, this was not a coup, it was not a coup attempt. The military was not involved and was independent. Judiciary did its job. And I mean, the possibility, the worst possible scenario was that a bunch of sitting legislators and maybe even the vice president were in physical danger and could have been killed. And that would've been a horrible, horrible thing, but we've had assassinations of presidents in the past in the United States and the US has gotten through it.
The reason that this is such a critical crisis in the United States is not because of the violence on January 6th. It's because the aftermath of January 6th was only greater political division. The aftermath of January 6th was only that larger and larger numbers of Americans believe that the election was stolen falsely, and larger numbers of Americans believe that their principal enemy is the political opposition across the aisle, in their own country. Their fellow Americans, their fellow citizens, their fellow patriots are actually their enemies and countries that operate like that don't stay functional democracies for long. This is not new. I've been talking about this. We've been talking about this as a country for a while now.
The US election process has been getting worse through the last two cycles. In 2016, an election that Trump won legitimately and I did not vote for him, but I told everyone at the time he was my president, but a lot of people that didn't vote for him did not say that. Hillary Clinton, of course, conceded and called Trump on the evening and congratulated him, but a large number of Democrats on the media and even sitting in office believed and said that the election was stolen by Trump, who engaged in collusion with the Russian government and shadowy forces to ensure that they could steal the election from Hillary Clinton.
And we even had an impeachment procedure over that. And we had the Mueller investigations over that. And for years you had Democrats saying that Trump was not a legitimately elected president of the United States. Then we had the 2020 election and it got a lot worse because in this case you had the sitting president of the United States saying that the fair election, which was certified by Republicans in the key states like Georgia and Arizona, and found no cases of significant fraud anywhere. And all of the cases that were brought by Trump and Giuliani and his supporters were either thrown out of court or found to be unfit. They were not clear cases. There was no substance to them. It was a free and fair election, but the president himself did everything possible to stoke the belief, the false belief that the election was stolen.
And therefore, that Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States, so much so that you now have millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans that believe that Biden is not their president, millions of Americans that believe that Trump should be installed as president by force. And this would be legitimate. This is unprecedented in our lifetimes, in the United States. We're going to have midterms coming up in November and the Republicans will almost surely win the House. And you see with all of the Democrats, some 25 Democrats in the House say they're not going to run again far more than Republicans, including some committee chairs. They all see the writing on the wall that they're going to lose. The Senate may well flip to Republican. That's a closer call. Many of the key swing states that are critical for certifying a 2024 election, the gubernatorial elections, the state legislatures are likely to be in the Republican hands on the back of 2022 elections.
In other words, we are set up for the 2024 election to be a step change even worse than 2020, which itself was a step change even worse than 2016. This is not normal in a democracy. This is an enormous challenge for the United States. And indeed, this could not happen in other advanced industrial democracies around the world. In the past few months, we've had elections in Canada, in Japan, in Germany, free and fair, peaceful transfer of power. We're going to have elections in the coming months in South Korea and in France. They will be free and fair, peaceful transition of power. We can no longer say this about my country. A fundamental part of a representative democracy are legitimate free and fair elections accepted by the citizens of the country. The United States no longer has that.
And so it's not a question of, can we keep democracy? It's a question of, can we rebuild some of the democracy that has eroded? Can we change the course that the United States is on right now towards a hybrid system, a system that no longer reflects and represents the interests of the average American voter? Unfortunately, right now, the answer is no. There is nothing that you can see in the near-term political future of the US that would imply that this is going to be fixed. It doesn't make me despair, but it certainly makes me want to work harder. And I hope that that is the reaction of most of you who are watching this today. It's something we're going to be seeing much more of as we get closer to the '22 midterms, which are the most important midterm elections in American history for all the reasons I just described and which will drive so much political danger and uncertainty as we get closer to 2024.
So that's a little bit for me on this rather disturbing anniversary, one year anniversary of the events of January 6th, I hope everyone's well and I'll talk to you soon.
Fiona Hill: January 6 rioters should sue Trump
One year after the US Capitol insurrection, what's the state of American democracy? For former US national security official Fiona Hill, not good.
"We're still grappling with the ongoing consequences of that particular event," she says. In her view, the events of January 6, 2021 laid bare "the deep divisions, the partisan infighting, the polarization within our society" — which resulted in American citizens storming "a building that is supposed to be a unifying symbol, symbol of freedom, of representational democracy, not of repression."
For Hill, we haven't fully processed yet what a big deal it all was. Why? One reason is that we lack a common narrative on what actually happened between Democrats and Republicans.
She also thinks those facing the music for January 6 should realize they've been lied to. Once they recognize that, Hill says, she'd sue those that egged them on under false pretenses — starting with former president Donald Trump.
Watch her interview with Ian Bremmer in the upcoming episode of GZERO World.
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One journalist’s view from inside the US Capitol on January 6
British reporter Robert Moore, who works in Washington DC for the UK network ITV News, was one of the few journalists embedded with the insurrectionists that stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Moore describes what he saw as he and his broadcast news crew covered what became an angry and dangerous mob, as they forced their way into the halls of Congress.
Watch the episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Is American democracy in danger?
What you should know about Elise Stefanik’s rise in the GOP
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Who is Elise Stefanik and what does she mean for the Republican Party right now?
Elise Stefanik is a young member from Upstate New York. She had originally started her career as a staffer in the George W. Bush administration, but in recent years, has turned into one of the most outspoken defenders of President Donald Trump, particularly during the impeachment trial last year. She's relevant right now because it looks like she'll be replacing Liz Cheney, the Representative from Wyoming and also the daughter of the former Vice President, who has been outspoken in her criticism of President Trump since the January 6th insurrection, and probably more importantly, outspoken in her criticism of the direction of the Republican Party.
The irony here though, is that while Cheney is going down, she's being replaced by somebody who, when she came into office, was expected to be a pretty standard-bearing Bush Republican. And so this is just really indicative of where the Party is, very hard to stay on in Republican leadership if you aren't going to be a supporter of President Trump. Too many of Cheney's colleagues thought she had become a distraction and wanted her gone. Stefanik is probably a placeholder. She says she doesn't want to serve in the position long-term. She eventually wants to take over the chairmanship of a committee, and she has many years ahead of her in Congress. She is very young.
What's the outlook for the Democrats' election bill?
Well, the Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced a bill to rewrite federal election law. Traditionally, election laws have been set by the state. States are allowed to choose how to do their redistricting. They're allowed to choose how people vote. Do they do mail-in votes? Do they have no-excuse mail-in votes? How many days of early voting are they going to allow? And, the Democrats bill would append that entire regime, and create a federal standard that every state would have to meet for number of days of pre-election day, in-person voting, standards around absentee voting, how to draw districts, taking it away from partisan gerrymandering and moving it towards a commission, in most states. And, there's been a lot of opposition to it. So the Democrats argue that this bill is necessary because Republicans are passing what they think are restrictive voting laws across the country. And Republicans are saying the Democrats are trying to take over and federalize elections to increase the chances that they win future elections and hold onto their current majorities in the House and Senate. And there's truth to both claims. The bill is very unlikely to move anywhere. It has 49 Democratic Senators who support it, who are co-sponsors, and one Democratic holdout, Joe Manchin. But even if Manchin never came around and said he supported the bill, it would require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, or the elimination of the legislative filibuster, so it's very unlikely to pass into law. You know this is a really big deal for the Democrats. They've given it the special designation S.1 in the Senate, H.R.1 in the House, which is a symbolic act suggesting this is their highest priority. But also, in a Rules Committee hearing earlier this week, both Majority Leader, Schumer, and Republican Minority Leader, McConnell, showed up to debate the bill in-person, debate amendments, and there've been multiple showdowns on the Floor. This is a really high-stakes piece of legislation. It would fundamentally tip the balance of power in favor of the Democrats were it to pass, which is, among other reasons, why Republicans are so opposed to seeing it get into law.
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