Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Tom Ginsburg: Why Constitutional Monarchy Might Be the Best Form of Government

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Get your copy of Gita Wirjawan’s book, “What It Takes: Southeast Asia”, NOW: https://books.endgame.id/ Also available on Amazon: https://sgpp.me/amazon/ Leave your review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241922036-what-it-takes---------------Democracy holds elections. But what makes them meaningful? In an era of polarization, algorithmic amplification, elite capture, and institutional distrust, Gita Wirjawan conversation with Tom Ginsburg asks a deeper question: what sustains constitutional democracy, and what erodes it from within?From Southeast Asia’s dramatic transformation since the 1980s to the rise of authoritarianism at home, this episode weaves these threads together to examine the institutional architecture that makes freedom possible. It explores not only how democracies erode, but also what the best model of governance truly looks like in practice, and the constitutional framework required to sustain it over time.About the guest:Tom Ginsburg is a prominent American legal scholar specializing in comparative constitutional law and international law. He is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, where he holds an endowed chair. He is widely known for his work on constitutional design, judicial politics, and the role of law in authoritarian regimes.#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #TomGinsburg---Episode you might like:https://youtu.be/7VAU6ejU3cc?si=sgdCyi4t9mfqOcxyhttps://youtu.be/PCYpeJYu9hY?si=xzB-5zj0P6ryQr0Vhttps://youtu.be/QZ1vMos7fck?si=C-OTKZ2htha_9dfs

Imperialism abroad leads to dictatorship at home. They go together like peanut butter and jelly. People like to have control of their lives. They don't like to live under corrupt government. They know when they're being lied to. Explain what democracy is. It means that whoever comes in knows they have the machinery of government that will more or less answer their commands.

But it's certainly better than systems where there's no rule of law, where whoever comes in appoints all their friends to the government jobs, and then they're just milking the state rather than actually working for the states. Do you believe in serendipity? I mean, for democracy to work, to have the right kind of leadership? So I often say that democracy means you get more turnover of mediocre leaders. And in a dictatorship, you might get Li Kuan Yew, but you might get Pulpott. Hope and disappointment are the emotions of democracy.

disappointed because we lost the election, but hope that we can win. And in dictatorship, of course, it's fear. That's the emotion. Hi, friends. It's a pleasure to tell you that my book, What It Takes, Southeast Asia, has been released in English and Bahasa Indonesia. You can buy it through books.endgame.id or at any of these stores. Now back to the show.

Hi, friends. Today, we're graced by Professor Tom Gensberg, who is a professor of law at the University of Chicago. Thank you so much. Oh, it's such an honor to be with you, Kitah. Thanks for having me on. You're one of very few Americans who got to spend their time in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand.

Tell us about how you grew up. Oh, well, how I grew up. And how you got stranded in Thailand. Yes, right. Well, so I'm from Berkeley, California. That's an important fact, which is, of course, the far west of the country. And I grew up, went to high school in the 1980s. And so, you know, for us, the idea that you would be somehow focused on Europe just seemed always very nutty to me.

Obviously, we were westward facing. It's also, as you may know, a very Asian part of the United States. I think San Francisco is about 40% Asian or something like this. So you grew up around a lot of people from a lot of countries and a sense that the world was huge and, again, westward oriented. My own background is that my, I grew up, my father's Jewish, and I grew up and I have a religious education, so that was unusual, even in Berkeley. And then my mother comes from the Central Valley of California, very poor, rural farmers, and she converted. And so I have a very big family of all kinds of Christians and Trump supporters and Catholics. And so I think that was, in some sense, that combined with Berkeley in general,

a very pluralistic place. You just got the sense there were all kinds of different ways to live and we all could get along and we just had to talk to each other. So that's a very important set of values for me. And when I was in college, I noticed on sort of a sign, oh, you could go to Thailand to study for the summer if you wanted. And so I decided to do that. And I went and studied there and had a very transformative experience in Chiang Mai.

I had also traveled a bit around the region, just kind of as a, a truble. traveler. I'd been to Singapore and Indonesia as well. And so that led to kind of a long engagement with the region. Over the years, I've worked on Cambodia, Vietnam, Lao, Myanmar, have done a lot of work in Myanmar the last few years, been to Indonesia a couple times. And it's just a wonderful part of the world. You've seen the place change since the 80s? Yes, absolutely. Which part for the better, which part for the worse? That's a great question. You know, the, like everywhere, there's been what we call globalization. And just one example where you would see that. When I first went, every Thai man would spend a month in a monastery. Nowadays, that's

very nominal. If they go at all, it might be for a day or three days or something like that. And you don't see the same number of monks walking around the streets, begging or anything like that. It's just, it's shrunk, that traditional part of Thai culture. So that's, I don't know if that's for the better or worse. I guess I'd probably say that's for the worse. You know, you can't, can't run too far from your traditions. You have to be grounded in where those things are. So material growth has been fantastic, and that is for the better. Absolute poverty rates are very low. At the same time, many of the countries there are stuck in what we'd call the middle income trap. They're not quite able to break out and become, you know, true first world

countries. A lot of that is institutional. So that's something where I think there's still some way to go. But there certainly has been a lot of great development, but also I fear for the lost traditions. What made you decide to go study law? I mean, you did Asian studies and your undergraduate studies, right? Yeah. Why law? Well, after college, I went to work for the Asia Foundation in San Francisco. And I was lucky enough to get a fellowship in public service, and I chose to go to the Asia Foundation. And that was just at the end of the Cold War. You and I are about the same age. You remember the period. Slapping younger.

Yes, that's true. But you remember that sense of like, wow, the world is really changing in a very fundamental way. It's a bit like right now, but without that same optimism, we don't have that same optimism. But back then, it was like, wow, the Cold War is over. And when I was working for the Asia Foundation, the country of Mongolia called us up and said, we would like some assistance in figuring out how to write a new constitution for the country. They were coming out of the Soviet yoke, if you will.

And so I was very young, but the people who were working on the Mongolian Constitution were not much older than me. They were quite young. And many of them are still my good friends. And my job was to sort of find the experts to come assist them and talk about what constitutions could do. And I found it so interesting. And so after a couple of years at the Asia Foundation, I said, you know, I really have to go back and study more to try to answer this question, which I've been really obsessed with ever since, which is what is constitutional democracy, how do you build it? And how do you sustain it in the face of forces which are trying to undermine it, which of course is a unfortunately relevant question today. So that's how I got into law. I came into law really as a scholar more than as someone who really wanted to practice law. But I like practicing law. I practice law briefly in Thailand as well later on. You've done a lot of work on constitutional law and democracy. Explain what democracy is. Yeah. So obviously democracy is a system in which the people govern. That's the fundamental definition since Aristotle. But in our conception, and I've developed a lot of this thinking with my co-author as he's Huck. We've written a couple books together.

And in our view, democracy is about more than elections. It's not simply having elections in which the loser concedes defeat. That's the minimum core of any definition of democracy. But what we point as legal scholars is you can't really have that kind of system functioning unless you have certain institutions which allow those elections to be meaningful. So one of them is a set of core rights. You can't have elections that are meaningful if you don't have freedom of speech, if you don't have freedom of assembly, informing parties and such. So a small number of rights would go in there.

But then we also highlight something which doesn't receive much attention in the literature, which is the importance of bureaucracy and the rule of law. And most simply, you can't really have an election that matters unless the people counting the votes are doing so in accordance with rules. that have been announced in advance, but we also emphasize that a civil service is really important for democracy, because it means that whoever comes in knows they have the machinery of government that will more or less answer their commands. Again, there's a lot of imperfection there, but it's certainly better than systems where there's no rule of law, where whoever comes in appoints

all their friends to the government jobs, and then they're just milking the state rather than actually working for the state. So I think bureaucracy is an important part of it, and that's exactly it's a hard sell in a way because people don't like bureaucracy. It's an epithet, but you can't really have a democracy with that one. How would you, I'm just curious of your view in respect to how democracy perhaps ought to be more about the distribution of public goods. And distribution of public goods is being challenged many places around. Yes.

Because of maybe the dysfunctional bureaucracy, the dysfunction of rule of law. Yeah. And a few others. Yeah, yeah. Does that warrant a refinement of the definition of democracy? I'm not sure it warrants a refinement of the definition, but it does provide a basis for critique, right? So, you know, from an economic perspective, why do we have a state to produce public goods? It can't be produced by the market.

Now, what are the scope of public goods in any particular society? That's open to contestation. And that's exactly what we fight about in democracy. Some parties think a bigger state, more public welfare is better. Some people think, no, no, what you really need is a minimal state. We'll be better off with that, that configuration. So we fight about exactly that. But I think what we see now is very interesting, particularly in South Asia,

a number of countries where people are seeing that the state has been completely captured by one or the other side, by maybe it's a collusion of a political class that's just, just taking all the public goods for themselves. And nothing left for the public in the public goods. And that obviously is not sustainable. And so what we really need is better systems of accountability for that. But when the accountability systems break down, you see what's happened in the last couple years in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh,

which is mass young uprisings that end up changing the government one way or the other. And that should be off equilibrium. You don't really want that to be a regular part of politics. I was thinking of public goods in a normal manner by way of welfare, healthcare, intellect, education, social value, and moral value. Now, put this in the context of Southeast Asia. You go from the westernmost village to the easternmost village, skip over Singapore. 80 to 90% of the heads of households don't have tertiary education. Yeah. That affects the quality of democratization.

Yes. That affects the quality of the intersection between power and talent. That affects bureaucracy. That affects governance. That affects leadership and all that, right? And we're talking about countries that have been not only experimenting, but embracing democracy for decades. And I'm not seeing the trends getting better. Yeah.

What's your take on this? Yeah. That's a great question, a great point. So first of all, for a functioning democracy, we know from the comparative political science literature, you need certain preconditions. It doesn't work everywhere. And the most important preconditions are a certain level of wealth and education on the part of the public. And Indonesia, particularly, is a very interesting country because there's been talk about it. It's like we've known what the solutions are.

And there's even been massive programs devoted to them, but somehow they never get implemented. Indonesia raises a very particular question, which is because of the sheer scale of the country, the sheer diversity, it's really, really incredible. And the fact that it's an archipelago, so it's even more diverse in some sense than India, because there's not easy communication across lines. You know, one of the solutions that's been offered for Indonesia since time immemorial has been decentralization. that, you know, everything's too much in Jakarta, too much on Java, let's decentralize. But there's a perversity to that because if you decentralize without the basic institutional structure in place, without an educated population, you're really ensuring that there's going to be massive disparities across these localities.

And you're sort of dooming those who start out behind to just get further behind because there's no mechanism of transfer. There's no mechanism of redistribution. And particularly there's the mechanisms of invested in human capital, which you're talking about really requires kind of national or regional solutions. So it's a bit of a paradox. Well, what's also paradoxical is that the politics has gotten decentralized in places like Indonesia and a few other democracies, right? But the economic activities got much more centralized compared with what we're seeing in China where the politics is so much more centralized.

But economically, it's so much more decentralized. Right, right, right. You go to Chongqing, you go to Chengdu, you go to Wuhan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, and all the others. You know, it's marginally different. It's not meaningfully different, economically speaking. So how does that vote for our desire to embrace democratic values going forward if we were to keep on democratizing, decentralizing politics, without actually democratizing or decentralizing economic activities. Yeah, that's a great question too.

You know, I think the thing with China is that the centralized politics have forced redistribution. It wasn't a natural thing. And, you know, when I first went to China, obviously, it was very early stage. But as you saw China develop, it obviously started on the coasts. But then the center forced the westward investment and things like this. And so that's a perfectly appropriate thing that you'd like to see happen. in a democracy is very hard in our democracies to have that happen, and especially when you have such decentralized politics. But one of the things, I guess I'd say, is what else can we do?

You just have to deepen democracy, because in a country like, you know, in Southeast Asia, generally, we have very few examples of really successful developmental states, Singapore, of course, but that's a city. At the state level, you in virtually every country have a problem of relatively corrupt elites. You know, there's been growth and there's been some shared growth,

but not the kind of developmental state to really keep the project moving forward and to break through that middle income trap. Korea was once a middle income country and now is not. Taiwan. And I would say one difference is is they did have centralized state politics.

They had a secure. security situation, which forced them to be more disciplined. Indonesia doesn't have any enemies. And so maybe that's allowed it to be a bit more loose in its management of the project of Indonesia. Some have argued that Singapore has been so great at distributing public goods. Consequently, deserves to be called a democracy. Well, I mean, one would also argue that, you know, in the last, two to three decades, they've given more space to the opposition, given more space to the media,

all that. How would you regard Singapore as a democratic entity? It's certainly, if you think of good performance as being democratic, then you would definitely put Singapore in that camp. But I don't consider it a democracy, because even though they have elections, there, as you know, highly constrained. And in particular, the element of free speech I mentioned earlier. You know, they have a little space in one park where you can go express yourself, but basically they're pretty repressive of speech that's critical of the government. Yet, they very wisely use elections and they do allow an opposition, which actually makes the regime stronger. So it's kind of a semi-democracy at best or a hybrid regime where they're getting the

benefits of elections in terms of information, but also have the ability to make credible commitments across time, which a single party can do. And it's a very well-governed place. The problem is we have no examples of that on any kind of scale, you know, outside of a city-state. And so I don't think it's always the best example. People say, oh, you know, the Singapore model, and it's not a model for much except a particular city. And, you know, for something as complex as Indonesia or the Philippines or something, that's just not going to be, it might be a source of some ideas, but you're never going to replicate that dynamic. We've got a few more islands to them. Yeah, just a couple.

Now, speaking of freedom of expression, what's your take on that as it relates to what's happening all over campuses in the U.S.? Yeah. Well, campuses have to be places of free expression. And, of course, we're speaking in University of Chicago Forum for free inquiry and expression. So this institute was set up just a couple years ago to deepen our very longstanding commitments here at this university. And the basic idea on a campus is it's a slightly different purpose than in politics. In politics, you have free speech so that you can criticize the government. And for that reason, we tolerate literally anything.

You can say anything you want on the corner or in the park. In a university, we have constraints. There's only a limited amount of space. We have classrooms. We're trying to teach and learn. And so I always say that free speech in a university is, derivative of our mission, which is to conduct inquiry, to contest ideas, to develop ideas, produce ideas, to teach students how to do all of that. And so we have constraints. You can't,

for example, come in a class and just start talking about politics, if it's not the subject of class. That's for both professors and students. But within those constraints, our job is to make sure that we have as robust interrogation of ideas as we possibly can. We should always resist orthodoxy, whatever that is. And that's been the culture of the University of Chicago for quite a long time. I don't think it's true of all campuses. I think there's been something of a decline in that ethos on American campuses in the last decade or two. And like everything, I'd probably attribute it to social media.

Everyone's afraid that some comment they're going to make in the classroom is going to get leaked out and they're going to get a mob on them. people are just naturally much more self-censoring. And that's very unhealthy, not just for the production of ideas, but for the soul, if you will. You, you know, to be able to express yourself and to argue and to take positions that you maybe don't agree with, I think is something that's really critical in order to advance everyone's, you know, to make progress on ideas. So we're trying to, you know, recommit the University of Chicago environment, to provide an environment for our students to be able to do that. but also to push back a little bit on the liberalism in the rest of the country. We've had a rough couple of years. We obviously had, first of all, the Palestine protests, before that Black Lives Matter,

so a sense of protest and cultural changes going on. And, you know, there's a lot we could say about any one of those topics. I think many universities were too repressive at both of those things. Some were too tolerant of some things. You can't really, in our tradition, in the United States, you can't like take over building. and hold janitors hostage and things like that. If that happens, there has to be disciplined for the students. So you can't disrupt.

But without disrupting, there's a lot of protests that you can do. And we try to help our students do that in ways that allow them to express themselves without breaking the fundamental rules. It's a tough time. The Trump administration's come in and really attack universities, withholding massive amounts of money illegally because of various concerns. anti-Semitism. They've had a war with what we call DEI diversity trainings and things like this. And we've seen that attack has been even worse in the red states. Whatever the federal government's doing, it's the red states where the action is really at because they educate a lot of students and they're trying to purge their campuses of what they

call divisive concepts. They're very dangerous for a free society. So I'm very concerned. How do you think that's going to affect scientific pursuits? Right. It's a real danger to the country. First of all, if you have an uneducated population, you're not going to be making scientific advancements. And if you have group think in science, that's also going to be a big problem. So this idea that you really have to contest ideas is absolutely critical. You know that 70% of all Nobel Prizes, since they were, began in 1901,

two. We're in the United States. And a third of those are to immigrants, by the way. So we have immigrants coming to the United States able to, you know, those people are the same as the ones in their home country, but here they're able, because of the environment, the institutional environment, to make great progress and develop great ideas and start companies. And I worry that that whole system is under some threat. Now, maybe this is just a temporary thing and, you know, we'll get back to the normal business of, but even what's happened has I think already destabilized things somewhat if you have a student in let's say Jakarta says you know I'd love to come to the United States but I don't I'm really worried about

what's going on with that government that's bad if they go to Australia or the UK that's bad for us it's good for the Australia and the UK but it might not be good for science because so far we don't have any system as good as the United States at generating scientific ideas Social media, you mentioned. There's been massive algorithmic amplification within the technological platforms, social media platforms. Some have even argued in the past that that could be equated with democracy. What's the remedy? The remedy with respect to the equating of algorithmic amplification with democracy.

Yeah. Well, first of all, if I had a solution to the social media challenge, I would be either very wealthy or very famous or both because it's a huge challenge. We haven't figured it out yet. We haven't figured it out. I don't think it's equivalent to democracy because there's no deliberation. Getting on to Twitter and yelling at each other and issuing death threats is not democratic speech. Again, you could do that in the public park, but no one would listen to you. And now you have people, because of the algorithmic amplification, no one is even responsible for who sees what. But what we know about the algorithms is that they tend to segment people and segregate people so that you see more of the things you like.

And that's the opposite of democracy. Because a democratic space is one where you and I might have different ideas and we come and we might argue and we might not change each other's minds, but we might. And the process of even having the discussion is the essence of democracy. So I see social media is quite antithetical. I'm not a big user of it. I probably should use it more. But I'm hardened by some philosophers. I'm thinking of Joshua Cohen at Stanford, who at Berkeley, I guess he is,

who said that, you know, social media is just, it's sort of like the printing press. When we was first invented, we didn't really know how to use the printing press. But then eventually, after a few decades, they started doing these pamphlets and you got the enlightenment out of it. And social media is. in its young days, we have not figured out how to use it. That's for sure. It hasn't been a force for good for our democracies. But maybe we will. Maybe we will. Maybe there'll be new technological developments where you get more control over your algorithm or maybe there'll be

some responsible social media company. The intersection of that with the AI is particularly insidious because you don't even know if you're talking to a human speaker. But you do know that if you go on to, you know, let's take Twitter and you've got 100 people issuing death threats to or you're yelling at you. It might be fake. There may be no person at all. That's just a net negative for society. I see no value in that kind of thing. The contemporary equivalence of Jonathan Gutenberg, they come from a much younger age group compared to those that are supposed to be regulating. And I call this anachronistic regulatory oversight. The guys that are supposed to be regulating, they don't even know what questions to ask. When the technology providers are

testifying, right? It's a bit of a walk in the park for them. Yeah. Right. And this, I think, allows them to get away with continuing with this bandwagon of equating algorithmic amplification with democracy. Yeah. Yeah. So I keep asking, what should be the remedy if there is also anachronistic regulatory oversight? Yeah. I mean, you pointed out something interesting. This is the first generation in history, of course, where the youth are much more empowered than the adults, right? Usually it's the reverse and the youth are rebelling against. And now the youth know how to use this stuff and the adults

don't. So that does create a little bit of a regulator regulated mismatch. which could lead to that kind of misperception that algorithms or democracy. On the other hand, you know, regulation like anything else is ultimately a matter of having some fundamental principles that guide your choices in situations of deep uncertainty. And, you know, it may be that we just need to think about at the level what those principles are going to be. You know, we don't want this thing. We want the thing to be a net social good, not a net social harm. we want, you know, to ensure that people are capable of actually deliberating on it. When technological sort of fixes would help that.

And, yeah, we want something that's not going to undermine our elections and things like this. And so I think we, you know, we may be getting there, at least the conversation is much richer than it was, you know, half a decade ago. But it could, the real fear is we'll be able to figure out in time, you know, or will the democracy have collapsed by them. One would argue that the quality of democracy or democratization is affected by the degree to which you have equality or inequalities, right? Yeah. And we're saying inequalities just skyrocketing, economic inequalities, opportunities, opportunities, opportunities, wealth inequalities, income inequalities. And they're not getting any better. They They force polarization inevitably, unstopably, irreversibly.

This, I think, has and is likely to continue affecting the quality of democratization going forward. You mention AI, right? I mean, if the pre-existing technological innovation, call it the Internet, was paradoxically de-democratizing, AI, I think, is intuitively, is likely to further elitize the pre-existing polarization. Yeah. Yeah. How is that boat for democracy going for? Yeah, again, we don't know. But it doesn't seem to bode well. But at the end of the day, I'm actually eternal optimist for the following reason. People like to have control of their lives. They don't like to live under corrupt government. They know when they're being lied to, generally speaking. This is where the information, misinformation thing comes in. And, you know, I think everyone everywhere wants to live in a relatively free way. So that's a kind of force, which is a bit unstoppable. And that's when we've seen the sort of right spots for democracy in the last few years, which there are some.

It's not all bad news. It's just in Dhaka in January. I live there, by the way. What's that? I live there. You live there in Dakka? Oh, my God. I was about that big.

Wow. Challenging environment. I mean, you tell Americans. I got an upgrade. I moved to India. There's a spacious country compared. there. That's really funny. You know, it's, you know, it's not, it's smaller than Indonesia, but not by much.

And the physical territory, it's like if everywhere was Java, you know, it's just so packed with people. But just to be clear, I had a great time. Yeah. Well, they're wonderful people. They're incredible. But they've been under a dictatorship for the last 15 years. Very interesting dictatorship because it's something that we see in a number of countries where

the party that liberates the country decides it has an eternal right to rule. That was the Awami League. That was the ANC in South Africa. That was Zanu P.F. in Zimbabwe. That's the Algerian regime. We're the ones who are the free number of fires. You be quiet. You're going to, you know, and they really were taking so much of the society that the youth basically said, no, we really don't want to be in a place where we have to be in the Owami League to get ahead in life.

And they started to react. And so I think Bangladesh is not a wealthy country, but they do have being Bengalis, a kind of. you know, democratic spirit, and they know when they're being lied to, and they had enough. And so, um, authoritarian regimes are brittle, generally speaking. And maybe the most resilient regimes would be ones that combine high levels of performance with, you know, some control over the political situation, but they do, at least are responsive. And that's a Singapore kind of story, right? It's like, okay, it's a one-party regime, but they've developed institutions, really significant, serious institutions which are responsive to changes.

And that's people would be happy to live in a place like that. If they've been, I think pretty good at showing credibility and accountability. Yeah, exactly. In respect to, you know, what they need to do with the citizenry. But my, I want to drill down a bit more on this. You know, if pick Indonesia, you go from Aceh to Papua, 88% the heads of households

don't have tertiary education then you know you could have better IQ overall your only hope of game changing

the quality of education is not at home at the rate that only 12% have tertiary education your only hope is when the kid goes to schools whether at the kindergarten level all the way up

to the universities, right? But if the teachers are only paid $200 a month when the Singaporeans and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese are making about $3,000 or $4,000 a month, yeah. Institutionally, you're just not going to be able to create as good a quality of academic domain. Yeah. Right? Because all the better talents are going to want to work for meta.

Yeah. Amazon, Google, or University of Chicago. Yes. Yeah. So this correlates with the quality of democratization. Yeah. Right. So the only way out of this, structurally speaking,

is to make sure that the compensation structure is going to be much better. Yeah. And that $200 a month for a teacher. Right. Until then, I think we're exposed. Yeah. And this is not uniquely within Indonesia. This, I think, reflects upon all, if not most of the Global South members.

Yeah. Absolutely. It's a huge structural problem. How do you get the best minds or even, not even the best minds? How do you get sufficient human capital to go teach out in rural areas? You know, we do this thing here, which is a lot of people will take a gap here between college and high school and college or college and graduate school and teach for America, that program. And actually here in Chicago, we have a lot of people come from all over to teach here because our schools are not great. We don't have a high performing school system. And they need the human capital to help bring it up. So that's the kind of thing which we could imagine if we define education as job one, as the national goal. And you make it, you know, hip to be a teacher, basically. That would be in Korea. It's hip to be a teacher. It is, exactly.

I know people who have rejected offers from great companies just to be teaching in Busan. or Enshan or some others in South Korea. Exactly. My daughter went to school in Japan for a while. And, you know, you just there too. We're just, you know, very, very serious, very dedicated to their craft and took it very seriously. And of course, they do a great job. So, yeah, there's a lot of things you can do.

There's also problems, of course, as you know, in many developing countries with parents who won't send their kids to school because what's the point and all this? We need them at home to work in the fields and stuff like that. And so here, you know, the Brazilian. program of paying people to do what's good for them. It's very helpful. I think we could use a bit more of that here in the United States, where, you know, if you're a poor kid in the south side of Chicago, your parents will get paid if you graduate high school. And they'll get paid if you, you know, get X grades in eighth grade and get vaccinated and things like this. That's a,

you know, thinking about carrots and not just sticks with regard to marginalized people is really important. Oh, it's all about international law. Okay. Right. You've been, big on this. How do you put what happened a few days ago in going into a war without, you know, congressional approval? Just explain to a layman like me. What's going on? What's going on? And how that votes for international law going forward. And not to mention, not respecting constitution. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk. There's two different dimensions, the international and then the domestic. So let's start with the international one. You know, when they write the obituary for the liberal order, January 2026 is going to be a critical

month. You might start with, it was January, February 2020, when Putin invaded Ukraine, because people don't realize how successful the UN system was before then. There's a lot of criticism of the UN, but it was very effective at stopping interstate war. There were a lot of civil wars, a lot of proxy wars, but the idea that you could just go in and take a foreign country over and claim it as your own was really not done for decades and decades. Then we had Putin go into Ukraine and he, oddly to his credit, at least made an argument as to why it was legal and international. It wasn't a very good argument.

Ukrainians were committing genocide and such where he very cleverly gave Russian passports to the people in eastern Ukraine and then said he was defending Russian. And so he being a lawyer actually had an argument. The Trump administration doesn't have an argument. It's just, hey, we're going to do this. I have not seen a legal claim on the international plane that this was consistent with the UN charter. And they're revisionists. They would like to get rid of the UN charter and start over.

I think that's very bad. And I think that's very dangerous. And those rules, again, they're so easy to beat up on the UN charter system. and yet it could be worse. It could be worse. Be careful what you wish for. To my mind, the purpose of the UN Charter, even though, of course, it talks about human rights and many other things,

the ultimate purpose was to minimize interstate war and to get rid of the 19th century system where imperialist powers could just go say, we like that. We're going in. And Trump, of course, is basically an imperialist in his mindset. So that's all very bad. Now, the domestic side, we do have. a clause in the Constitution which says Congress declares war. That has not been invoked since World War II. And in general, around the world, countries don't actually declare war against

each other anymore. It's a very much a 19th century thing. And in international law, it's sort of meaningless because the UN Charter speaks of hostilities. It speaks of armed attack and things like this, rather than, you know, a legal state called war. So now that he has done this, and every president before him, with the exception of Obama, has complied with this statute we have called the War Powers Resolution. War Powers Resolution says, if you're going to commit U.S. troops, you've got to tell us immediately, and you need our approval after 90 days. And, every president before every

president of Obama said that that was an unconstitutional statute but they still comply. Obama actually said it was a constitutional statute but Trump has every indication of just not caring and with Congress the way it is with a Republican majority, albeit

a thin one, assuming the war is going on after the period expires and assuming it's going relative well for the United States, which is hard to imagine and not, nothing will happen. And that means the war powers resolution is sort of dead too. So one of the, if you step back from the details of our moment, one of the big themes of history is that imperialism abroad leads to dictatorship

at home. They go together like peanut butter and jelly. And so I really do worry that this totally unconstrained executive outside matches claims that I must be unconstrained internally. And that would be very bad. But all that said, I retain some optimism because I don't think Americans are going to put up with something as crude as suspending elections or anything like that in this country. Do you idea that they're not going to be able to put up with this? Could that be manifested on what's likely to happen in November? Well, the great expectation is because it always happens. The opposition party always wins the midterms, almost always. And so given how unpopular Trump his polling is about 40% and very steady.

And that's where he was in his first term. It was pretty steady throughout that. So I expect Trump will continue to pull it 40%. But what's really important for a midterm election is turnout. Usually turnout is higher when there's a presidential election at the same time. So midterms are often determined by who shows up. And with all the ice stuff that was going on in cities, that really turns people off. Obviously, you're killing American citizens.

for doing nothing but exercising their constitutional rights. You know, you could see a really big landslide, but that also will depend on very local decisions by the Democrats about who they're going to run. So now, let's assume that the Democrats win the midterms in the House, but not the Senate. That's the best prediction. The Senate, the way the seats line up that are up this term,

it's going to be very hard for the Democrats. But assume they win the House. Now what happens? Well, Congress as a whole still can't act. But you will get much more investigations, much more sort of harassment by the Trump administration. And you might even have instances where the Trump and Trump people say, you know, we're not complying with what you're not showing up to testify. And that would lead to an interbranch showdown, which would be very interesting from a constitutional law perspective. But I expect there will be a lot of fighting still.

The way the administration is acting so far, they don't care if they're violating the law. They have said that they don't have to spend monies that are appropriated. by Congress. That's illegal. And so on. So the courts are not going to force them to do anything, but the fact that they've lost, if they lose in Congress, that could force some moderation because individual Republican congressmen know that their future, their long-term future, depends on being re-elected many, many times. And they don't want to be brought down by an administration, which at best is only in the last, you know, a couple more years or six more years or whatever it's going to be. So that intra-party constraint might get activated if the

Democrats win, and that could change things a bit. The Board of Peace, I'm curious of your views with respect to whether or not the Board of Peace is likely to shape or reshape or color the future in the context of what you aptly pointed out as institutional revisionism. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a big believer that the Board of Peace will go anywhere. Its first challenge is Gaza, and there's still violence in Gaza. You know, Israelis and Palestinians cannot solve their problem on their own. They're just never going to be able to. And unless you have a significant will of the

international community, it's almost impossible to imagine, to come in, or you have surrender by one side. Hamas just says, you know, we're right. We destroyed Gaza. We're going home. I don't see that happening. They're going to keep fighting. And it's not going to turn into the Riviera with Trump hotels.

And so if the Board of Peace is set up around that project, it's definitely not going anywhere. The other thing is, I'm sure, you know, countries are giving the billion dollars and joining the Board of Peace, but that's basically a Trump play. It's not a play for an institution. And Trump is not an institutional. a list. He isn't someone who builds institutions. He's someone who breaks them. He might be breaking the Republican Party. So I don't think that, I don't think there's much future for it. I think if we look back in five or ten years, it might be an answer to a trivia question in a pub or something

like that. I also think there's no real substitute for the UN. It's a structure which is there in which every country is represented on the basis of sovereign equality. We know that's a fiction, but there's something quite powerful about its ability to speak. Doesn't function as it was designed, lots of agency problems, I get it. I don't see any substitute. Well, there is an argument that one of the principal weaknesses of the UN would have been the existence of the Security Council. Yeah. The fact that Trump was made the lifetime chair of the board peace singularizes the Security Council.

This even magnifies the preexisting deficiency with respect to multilateralism, right? Yeah. So does that serve as an argument that this is probably not going to last? I think so. Again, this gets back to the general theme of institutions. Institutions last. That's what they do. They're enduring structures across time.

If it's too personalized or too individuated, it's not going to last. And I think the only reason we're seeing any uptake at all is basically with leaders, who want to get along with Trump for whatever reason. It's one way of buying him off and such, and there are many other ways to do so. So I don't see that going anywhere. Now, the original Security Council, of course, is a very interesting institution, a very important one.

And the idea, of course, was that they were, you know, you needed to recognize that there were power imbalances. These were the winners of World War II. Obviously, it hasn't been very functional whenever there's great power conflict. and that's been the state and will be the state of affairs for a long time, given the U.S. and China, U.S. and Russia. So it's always kind of hamstrung, and it means that the U.N. in general can't do as much as it otherwise could. I'm not sure a world in which there was no Security Council in the General Assembly just decided things would be a better or more peaceful world either.

So, you know, it's a highly imperfect structure. I'm not here to defend the decisions of the drafters of the U.N. Charter in 1945. It's just that once it exists, it's got a certain weight, just like other institutions. What's a model institution? I mean, you've studied institutions and constitutions since 17 something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you've talked about this at length. Yeah, it's a great question. Well, for constitutions, I'm actually very partial to the German system.

I like it very much because it's not a presidential system. Indonesia and the United States are presidential systems, which have a winner-take-all quality. That means when you're in, you get everything. When you're out, you get nothing. And parliamentary systems tend to be a little better at representing the whole swathes of opinion in the public sphere. So I think that's good. They have a constitutional court, which is high quality. Everyone thinks it's a model court. And they have, you know, good provisions on things like emergencies that we don't have. So if you're thinking about a constitution is like a set of institutions, that seems like a pretty good model. Well-run institutions are ones that we tend not to pay

attention to. That's the interesting thing about them. When they're working well, you don't even notice them. Take it for granted. Right. The Federal Reserve for the last, you know, 40 years or whatever was, whatever it's been. 1914. 1914, that's right. Generally, it's done a very good job with a couple hiccups. The, you know, inspectors general, this is a very obscure institution in the United States, but it's our accountability system. Every agency has an inspector general whose job is to make sure that the people in the agency are following the law. Incredibly effective. Lots of reports, general accounting office of Congress.

Same kind of thing. An accountability institution. The public doesn't know about these things. But it's telling that when you, this government came in, the first thing they did was fire all the inspectors general because they don't want accountability. The GAO will now assume maybe, you know, the major responsibility for telling us what's going on in the, in the government. But those kind of things you just don't notice very much.

Counter-corruption commissions, there's an interesting species. And I don't want to comment on the Indonesian one, the rise and fall of it, because I just don't know the facts well enough. But, of course, they are really critical. And when they're functioning well, again, you don't really notice them. But when they're not, then things are painfully obvious. One of the things I'm studying is like the decline of institutions, obviously. And they're so difficult to build up an institution with credibility and institution that functions well. It's pretty easy to degrade and undermine.

And so what's becoming clear, I think we learn this from the instances of democratic backsliding, which was arrested, which was stopped. You know, when you have a situation where democracy seems to be in decline, and then something happens to save it, oftentimes it's key institutions that play that role. It's a military that stays in the barracks or courts that decide cases according to the law despite political pressure. That's really, you can't do anything without institutions. You've alluded to recently the idea of constitutional monarchy as a better working function than some others. Talk about that. Yeah, it's a kind of radical idea in an American context. But you start with the fact that constitutional monarchy,

is a pretty common form of government. There's 40-something monarchies still in the world. About eight of them are absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Emirates and things like that. Brunei, of course, yes. All of them, by the way, set up, all of them but one, were set up by the British basically for oil control. You know, control that. I wonder why. Yeah, exactly.

So Brunei is a very interesting history in that regard. But setting those aside, look at the world's constitutional monarchies. you know, what is it, 20% of countries or something like that, but it includes Japan, Spain, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia, Thailand, Thailand, obviously. Cambodia. Yeah, and Cambodia, most of them are among the world's top-performing democracies and richest countries. Cambodia's exceptional. It's neither democratic nor rich. But Thailand has been very stable and stabilized by constitutional monarchy.

got interested in this because I had lived in Thailand. I'd later lived in Japan and I moved from Japan to the Netherlands, all of which were these constitutional monarchies where the monarch is just kind of a figurehead and even worse than a figurehead, I sometimes call them the prisoners of society. They have no ability to do anything. Imagine being born into the Japanese royal family. It'd be a terrible life. You'd spend your whole life in this beautiful palace with every move constrained, everything ritualized. It'd be a very hard life. Can't speak. you can't move. You don't have human rights. But they play an important function for the rest of us as our prisoners. What is that function? First of all, they give us a sense of continuity as a people.

Japanese are an extreme case because the imperial family, as you know, has descended from the sun goddess 2600 years ago. And that says basically to the people, we are something. We are a people that have existed since time immemorial. We are unified by that person. In more diverse, countries like Thailand, the king also plays that same unifying role. Because even though it's a Buddhist country, and they use a lot of Buddhist idiom, as you know, there's many Muslims in the southern part of Thailand, and they can signal their allegiance to the monarch, who then has the job protecting him. And we have many examples of this in history, where monarchs, particularly in Europe and World War II, the monarchs were the ones who defended the Jewish people, not the republics.

The republics like France tended to serve them up. But monarchs like the king of Morocco, the kings in Scandinavia, would step up and defend their people because they were their subjects. So they play a unifying role. Now, in our era, there's another function that they play, which is someone like Donald Trump comes along and says, I represent the people. I know what the people want. And those other people, they don't matter. That's a quote from him. He is claiming to be the sole channel of the popular force.

You know, you can't really say that if you're a prime minister in a constitutional monarchy. Boris Johnson couldn't say, I alone represent the people. And he's faded away. No one is going to be an answer to a trivia question in a few years. The people are already represented by this figure. That function is already played. So it's kind of a ceiling on populism. It limits populist claims.

The last thing it does, which I think is kind of interesting, is it provides a little bit of reassurance to conservatives. That is, you know, one of the reasons you get polarization historically is you might have a rising working class, conditions of inequality, for example. We need a communist revolution. And if you keep the monarchy, you're basically saying we're not having a communist revolution because communism is incompatible with monarchism. It sort of tells the conservative side of society, don't worry. Your property rights will be protected. Your faith. Monarchs often have a connection with the national religion. It provides a certain amount of stability. So I've become a big fan. Now, can you create one out of scratch? No, Donald Trump might want to be a monarch. But you can't just

make one up out of the blue. It has to be the right historical circumstance. But you know, you mentioned Cambodia. Cambodia. It brought back the monarchy. And it's a very interesting kind of hybrid case where it's not, it's a dictatorship. I don't know that it limits what goes on in the dictatorship, but still shows you can draw on those resources for certain legitimation. Given your observation, how would you draw on a picture for the evolution of democracy in the U.S.? Going forward? Well. I mean, to the extent that constitutional monarchy might be a better working system.

Yeah, I don't see that we could, I don't think it would ever work here. We did fight a revolution over this, and King George is the person we pilloried. So, you know, you can't, it doesn't work for everybody. Like democracy itself. No, I think our resources for reviving democracy are several, and they are there. Remember that the U.S. is, first of all, a huge complex, you know, country. It's very hard to take it. It's very hard to run America.

And you see that federalism is very real here. Our federalism is one where over time power has moved to the center, but still, the states are in our legal parlance sovereign with certain authorities that even a pro-Republican Trumpist Supreme Court would have to respect. And one of those has to do with control over the machinery of force. That's another factor. We don't have national police force here in the United States. We have tens of thousands of police forces, each one reporting to a local mayor. And so that's, it's very hard to have a national kind of, you know, Soviet-style system of repression or anything like that. I don't see that happening. Could you have some stolen elections? Yeah. And could you have a, but here's another constraint that we have, which is the markets. Imagine that we tried to do a January 6th again in January 6, 29. I think the markets would react very negatively. And that's a constraint. It's a big, big, complicated country.

And I guess that last point highlights that there's a lot of money in the United States completely outside of the control of government. This isn't one product economy, an oil economy or something like that. We have tremendous history of entrepreneurship, a tremendous culture of capitalism, petty capitalism, if you will, which used to be called American exceptionalism to explain why we weren't becoming communist, you know. But in fact, it means that there's just a lot of money that the government can't get and can't control without killing the golden goose. So I think in the end, like everything in American history, we have our ups and our downs. And if you look at our history, it's not a continuous march of progress.

We often have one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward. It's back and forth. And we're in a period of institutional regression. That's really bad. I think it will be reversed. And then the question is, what institutions do we build that are more resilient and responsive in the future? And that's really a hard problem. I mean, a lot of people thinking about that.

There's an observation that ever since the end of the Cold War, call it the early 90s, right? The United States started getting on this unipolar bandwagon, trying to spread liberal values all across the world. Some have failed the attempts, right? And there's a group of people that think of this approach as one that would have been a little too universalist, right? And you've alluded to pluralism. Yeah. Within any kind of approach that anybody wants to superimpose or socialize with respect to others, right?

I want to just test this hypothesis. will the U.S. or the West be able to help re-globalize more with pluralism with respect to any, whether it's the liberal values or whatever? And then I want to juxtapose that what China might want to do with respect to globalization. I'm just curious as to what your views are. That's very interesting. So I always say that international law is inherently pluralist. It can be a socialist country. It could be in theocracy.

You still have sovereignty. You still have the rights of territorial integrity, the right to defend yourself. And so, you know, I'm not, I don't think it's universalist with regard to regime type. The United States was in a period, you know, after in the triumph of the Cold War where it did seek to spread democracy. And I would add that I think a lot of that work was really good and really important and led to some wonderful success stories. So there are many countries that are democracies that wouldn't have been. and had the United States not been pushing for it during and after the Cold War. But obviously, there are limits to that.

It doesn't mean it's for everybody. And in particular, the idea that you could go in and invade Iraq and turn it into a democracy seemed really crazy at the time, though, to be honest, at this point, Iraq is the closest thing to a large Arab democracy there is. They do have rotation in office. And still, I would have opposed that effort because I didn't think it was it led to too much violence and all that. So I think that was chastening. We learned, well, you can't really impose it. And now we're in Trump land. And Trump is basically a spheres of influence person, doesn't care at

all about democracy, and doesn't really care about internal affairs of anything. So it's more about international dealmaking by, you know, a few number of princes, if you will. I don't think that's a sustainable model. I don't think people are really going to put up with that, but it did break the old model, the old model of democracy promotion they destroyed. So on that side, I don't see that kind of universalism going forward. On the Chinese side, they've always been, for, as you know, millennia, pluralistic. Like, they never sought to have territorial control of everywhere around their borders. They haven't invaded a neighbor. With a thousand years. Yeah, with exception of Well, you know, it was the 13th century.

Right. It was a Mongol. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, and exception to Vietnam in late 70s, but, you know, outside their neighborhood, never are they as adventurous as us. I mean, we're just invading a country that's literally halfway across the world with no interest or possibility of territorial that we're going to control it, you know, in a territorial sense. So China is a much more inherently pluralistic culture about regime type. At the same time, China is much more sophisticated about getting what it needs from countries and what the limits are and such. And that's a form of danger.

I think it is a danger to sort of the free discussion of ideas in particular. We've actually seen there's some evidence that the number of papers critical of China is in decline, not through any open. overt repression just through sort of subtle forms of, well, you want that visa, are you really going to, you know, write that? People are turning away from topics that are critical of China. And, of course, within China, there's this move that everyone has a duty to speak well of China all the time. So it's not very good for knowledge and free expression and discourse. I wouldn't say it's universalist, but it is increasing its soft power. And one of the things I think will be interesting to see over the next couple of years is given the United States total disruption of the international order, is our soft power going to decline?

Are we finally going to see people stop listening to hip-hop and wearing blue jeans? And a lot of the Chinese cultural products are now big things. More BTS from Korea. Well, the Koreans are obviously, as always, as always, punching above their weight. I'd like to talk about Korea a lot. I like to think about it. I'd like to go there. It was just there in December because when I first went there was 1986.

They were preparing for the Olympics. It was a dictatorship. It was Chun Du Huan time. And there was all this street fighting and protests. And the country was just building itself up a country that was poorer than Egypt in the 50s. And now, look at it. You know, it's just come so far to even be a cultural, you know, leader throughout Asia and throughout the world. Really incredible place.

So dynamic, and they've done it while being democratic. So in a way, it's like the model for us all in some sense. If you could have a system of rotation in office where yet there's this kind of culture of innovation and competition, there are some problems, as you know, the Koreans are the people who are least able to reproduce themselves, and they're not that open to foreigners. Well, they've got the AI argument. Yeah. They can depopulate until 30 minutes.

million and still be able to thrive. Is that right? I heard that now. Okay. That's what the Korean say. Okay. Good luck. Do you believe in serendipity?

No, that's an interesting question. Would it for democracy to work? To have the right kind of leadership? Well, you have the right kind of desire by the citizenry to rise up to the occasion? Yeah, I wouldn't say the latter is serendipity. That's culture. That's a kind of set of citizen demands. Leadership is important in democracies, but less so.

and precisely because with democracy, you get rotation in office. So I often say that democracy means you get more turnover of mediocre leaders. And in a dictatorship, you might get Likuan Yew, but you might get Pulpot. And that draw is... I burn the candles every day. Yeah. For somebody like Linguineau to show up. Yeah.

I mean, I'd love to ask you, and I guess I were later about Indonesia and its prospects, because the quality of leadership surely matters, but they sometimes say we get the leaders we deserve, in which case we haven't done very well in the United States. No, I think at the end of the day, rotation in office term limits are really important because of what they do to incentivize the naming of successors, trying to extend political programs through legislation,

through law over time. And I'm actually writing a book on this now on term limits. I just think it's so important. You see countries that don't have them, bad things happen. Putin invaded Ukraine right after he had established that he would be able to be present until 2036. Xi Jinping, you know, it's been, I worry that once there's no constraint on the individual, he's going to need to have, he has a civilizational timeline in mind. And before he goes, he'll want to reunify the country.

and I worry about that kind of thing. When people are able to stay in office forever, their plans get ever grander. Here's a contrast. Mexico, very popular charismatic leader, Omlo, finished his term in office with 70% popularity. When you drive around Chicago, if you have a Mexican Uber driver or something like that,

you'll be hearing, you were hearing Omlo talk on the radio every morning. People love the guy. He, because they're strong system of term limits, which constrained even the PRI, Amlo had to step down, and now we're seeing some tension between him and the new president, and that's good. It means that one person can't, that we're looking at institutions over individuals, parties over personalities, long-term over short-term kind of visions. And I think that's critical.

Let's talk about Southeast Asia. Yeah. If you've talked quite a bit about retrogression, democracy, pick which country you want to start first. Yeah. Well, I'm upset at the place I've spent the most time, which is Thailand, because, you know, you had the 1997 constitution, it was a good set of institutions. It couldn't really handle toxin-shinawatt. It allowed a kind of populist takeover. And then the system recalibrated itself through a series of coups. That's all fine. What really got me, not fine, but it's, it was, these are Thai-style coups.

They weren't violent coups. what really got me upset actually is when the new parties started to get formed and they would be suspended by the Constitutional Court. I don't think that's good. You're basically telling a pretty important sector of society, which is the urban youth of Bangkok, that, no, you can't go anywhere here. You're too radical. And all they were, you know, there's, from my perspective, asking for less abuse of the less Majest laws, less abuse of it. They weren't trying to get rid of the monarchy. They weren't trying to get rid of even the less Majesil. It's just like, let's, let these things be abused, and they have been abused terribly in Thailand. So that was not good.

I wasn't very happy about that one. Malaysia, very interesting moment when Mahatir Muhammad re-emerges, and you think, wow, there might be a real change here. And then the system recalibrates itself with help, by the way, of the constitutional monarch. That seems like an opportunity miss. Because I always say about Malaysia, one of the reasons it's stuck in the middle income trap is it's politics. It's sort of redistributive pork barrel political class, which isn't really allowing the full talent of the country to be utilized, especially when you talk with minority Malaysians. You really realize they don't see themselves being able to succeed maximally in their own country. just like the urban youth of Thailand.

That's not good. You've got to have the youth see chances for themselves in life. Otherwise, you end up like Bangladesh. Indonesia, of course, I don't know well at all. But it does strike me that the kind of grand coalition... You're just being clashes. Yeah, no, no. I just don't know.

And your audience will. But the grand coalition looked... Something didn't smell right from outside because it looks like you can always form a grand coalition in any society, in any day. democracy. And when you see that, it goes against kind of a fundamental principle of democratic office holding, which is that, you know, you have a program and you come in and then you leave and then maybe the next people get a turn. But when you're in office, you're able to really determine what's happening. A grand coalition looks like collusion to milk the state.

That's what it looks like from outside. And there's some democratic theory about this, Anthony Downes and stuff. Minimum winning coalition is what you should expect in. viable democracy. So without knowing much about it, I've also worried a little bit about the institutions like the Constitutional Court that would happen to the Anti-Corruption Commission, that the Indonesian democracy hasn't been sufficiently institutionalized in a real deep way. And without it, you can't really take it to the next level. What's the fix? This is a great question.

I mean, what would be ideal is you had a party, a reformist party, come in with reform politics that got people to be less tolerant of corruption. That's what we have in places like Chicago. We had a terrible. That's a high bar. Yeah. Chicago's a very low bar. It's a well-run city. But, and we're still a one-party city. We've been run by the same party since 1932. And that shows in some of the governance when you're kind of dealing with the city government. Yet, it's a beautiful city. They managed to deliver some public goods. We had these very hardcore political machines. And what eventually happened is that people, and there's still some remnants of them, but we had federal prosecutors come in and prosecute the corrupt aldermen. We had businesses that

stopped paying the bribes and would actually insist on their constitutional or their contractual rights and things like this. Still a long way to go. But you need that kind of reformist politicians. That's what we see in the cities of the United States where the machines were broken. I don't know in Indonesia. I don't know that I've seen someone really able to capture the national mood on a reformist institution building strategy. And again, that's really hard because institutions aren't very sexy. They're not like, you know, people don't really understand how they need them, you know? They really do need them, but they take them for granted.

You were there, what, a couple of years ago? Yeah, I think that's right. We did some studies on constitutional court grade. Indeed. visited there, talked with many of the justices, and, you know, in that institution, to my mind, has performed very well. Some of the case law, the cases that they're producing are really excellent. Indonesia, as you know, better than me, is a country that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves from the outside world. It's a huge, pretty well. Say no more. Yeah, it's really,

but it's true. You know, there's a lot of bright spots in Indonesia. And, you know, some of those take the of dogs that didn't bark, you know, fights that didn't have, violence that didn't happen and such, elections that were held and the votes were counted. And I just think it needs, we need to do a better job of celebrating those instances where things are going right or good things happen. Democracy is always messy. It's always ugly in some sense. But we should, and there's a phenomenon where because you're in a democracy, you can criticize the government you have. have. If you were to survey people in China and, you know, in, you know, the United States about, you know, how much do you like your government? Americans are going to seem much less happy. But that's precisely because we can. And in some sense, a certain amount of discontent is a sign of a well-functioning democracy because we know that we can always do better in the future. I sometimes say that hope and disappointment are the emotions of democracy.

Disappointment because we lost the election, but hope that we can win the next time. the same coin. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in dictatorship, of course, it's fear. That's the emotion. I want to stick with Southeast Asia. I mean, one of the symptoms, if not diseases of Southeast Asia is that we're not great storytellers. To the point where people in Chicago would get much more excited talking about Tanzania, Korea, Taiwan. Yeah. Yeah. Taiwan. Yeah. Yeah. much smaller countries. I mean, we're talking about a region that's got 700 million people. Yeah. It's the third largest after India and China. Yeah, that's true. We're bigger than the EU. Yeah. But nobody talks about it in Chicago. Yeah. You go down to, I don't know, Skokie. It's only going to get worse. Yeah.

And I can show you some empirical evidence in terms of why we're not telling stories to each other, our intra-trade. the degree to which we trade with each other is only about 23% of our collective GDP. Compare that with the Europeans. Yes. We're trading with each other at a rate of 65% of their collective GDP. To me, intuitively, that just tells me we're not telling stories to each other better. Yeah, even within the region, you're saying. Within the region.

I think that's true. I think that's true. You know, when we criticize the European Union, sometimes if I want to make this point in class, I'll say, So how many of you are from Europe and where are you from, you know, Germany, you know, France? How many of you would say that you're a citizen of the European Union and the hands just don't go up? They don't really identify yet with the European Union. But that problem is tiny compared with the Southeast Asian identity problem. People don't realize that they are societies with certain similarities in structure, similarities in history, one of which, of course, is a deep pluralism.

That's one of the great strengths that Southeast Asia has to teach the rest of us is the pluralism. I agree. I agree. I think the project of trying to tell the story better would be good because otherwise it's only the inevitable bad stories. Myanmar people know about. But even when you talk to people about Myanmar, even in the policy community, they know one thing about Myanmar, which is the Rohingya expulsion. They don't really follow the dynamics of what's happened and what's happening on the ground. and such. And so, you know, bad news sells. Quiet, good news doesn't.

Yeah, I mean, we've had many episodic stresses in the last 2,000 years. Yeah. I would argue that we're probably some of the most peaceful and stable regions in a world. By the way, if the number of casualties we've had in the last 2,000 years, altru, compared to the numbers that we're seeing in many other regions. Yes. Right. One of which is Europe. Yeah. Just take a look at the number of casualties we've seen in the last, call it two to three hundred years.

Yeah. It's more than 100 million lives lost. And Southeast Asia has only seen about 9 or 10 million lives lost in the last 2,000 years. Wow. But we have differences of opinions or views as they relate to ethnicity, sovereignty, religion, race. But we don't promote this. Yeah. We don't tell this.

Yeah. You could go even further and say that the worst incidence of violence in South Africa, Southeast Asia are caused by the importation of European ideologies like Marxist-Leninism in Cambodia and such. And so that, yeah, I think that's right. So scholars who look at conflict talk about regions where interstate conflict exists and where it doesn't, the Middle East, for whatever reason, for thousands of years, has been a place of a lot of conflict. Latin America, not so much in the last century or so. It's a kind of puzzle for war scholars. Why has there been no interstate war? And maybe there's something deep to look at the history of Indonesia, all the tiny sultanates and

rulers and how they negotiated amongst each other. I don't know. Maybe one hypothesis is that the conflicts are among elites, but not among peoples. The peoples have a kind of tolerance towards difference. It's mostly about real estate. Yeah. As with many other places around a world. No, that's right. You've alluded to a number of times the importance of peace as an element of international law, as opposed to justice, as an element of international law. Explain that. All right. So we sometimes hear this expression in the United States, no justice, no peace, which is a protest slogan, meaning if we don't get what we want, we're going to break some windows. And without justice, we can't have peace. And I, although I grew up,

in Berkeley, so I've been in more than my share of protests in my life. By the way, my two kids won't there. Oh, do they really? Yeah, I hope my father went there to. Is that right? It's a long tradition of Indonesia, the Indonesian connection there. You know, it's, I hope that they didn't get involved in too many protests, but everyone's while a good protest is. I'll tell you later.

Yeah, off the record. You know, justice from a sort of legal point of view, legal theory point of view, is what we fight about. Like, what is just? What exactly does justice require? For some people, justice requires taking the money from the rich and redistributing to the poor. For others, justice requires the protection of property rights, no matter what. So that's a fight about justice, ultimately. What does justice look like in the Middle East? Well, you know, from one side, it's these people moving out, and for their side is these people moving out. So there's no way to reconcile those views. So because justice is what politics is about justice is what we fight about, courts have a very limited role in the ability to, especially international courts, which have no force behind them, in the ability to articulate effectively what contested visions of justice, how to square contested visions of justice.

Now, international courts do have the ability to resolve disputes among people. That's a kind of of core function of courts. But when you're resolving a dispute, it's not always about the first principles of justice. Sometimes it's, what can you live with? You don't get all the justice you want. You get something. And I get something. I say, okay, that's fine. And then we can, having the dispute resolved, we can move on and go forward. It's a very important function of courts. It's essentially peace preserving or peace extending. But it doesn't, it's not so ambitious as to say that we're articulating a vision of justice. So my, in my assessment, my empirical assessment, is that international courts do better when they're

resolving disputes among parties that want the dispute resolved than when they're imposing from outside a vision of justice that may or may not have any local grounding. And that's depressing for a lot of people because, of course, it's the International Court of Justice. With courts, we tend to think their job is to give justice, to provide just solutions. And, of course, in a domestic context, that's often true. But in a world of international conflict among states and things like that, that's often far too much to ask for. So in my view, the courts have been much more effective when they're talking about things like, I don't know, a boundary dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia. They'd say, this is where the line is. You get this island. That's fine. Then that can resolve the

dispute. The countries can live together and move on. But to say, to go in and say, you know, your side needs to move out and make way for this side. That's not going to work. And it's sort of peace undermining rather than peace extending. Intuitively, in a unipolar order, where and when you would have had one guy as the police, the CEO, the judge, whatever, the attorney general. One would have been able to tell everybody of the 195 countries what to do intuitively. Yeah. Now, in a much more multipolar world, the proliferation of revisionism is inevitable.

Yes. How is that going to bode for peace? Yeah. It's a great question. It doesn't bode well. You know, if we look back, we might say that peace, a unipolar world, as you've described, as basically an empire, a global empire. And that's always impossible.

There's always barbarians around the edge and such. And so we might look back at the bipolar world of the Cold War as being one where at least there was this interstate peace among the powers, even if it wasn't always warm and comfortable. A multipolar world could be one, as long as in which there was pluralism. We recognize spheres of influence and things like. Could be a peaceful world. But it might not be. and in particular the precedent we've just seen set by the United States, where it's like, well, we don't like these guys.

We think they're going to attack us. We don't have a very good rationale. We're just going to do it. That in the hands of if you let everyone make that choice, we're going to live in an extremely violent world. But, you know, it's hard to know. It's very hard to know. Iran, of course, was exporting violence.

That's what they did. And it's very hard for me to understand why they, they would rather invest in, you know, undermining other states and supporting terrorism, including against the United States, over their own citizens, highly ideological. You know, in international relations, I know you've been talking with other folks about international relations, there's a kind of a vision of states as being rational actors, you know, where we're just calculating all the time. And in that world, that's actually a very peaceful world.

If we all knew each other's capabilities and we're negotiating in the shableness, of that. The problem is, of course, we have countries that are led by human beings. And human beings are emotional. They sometimes have their short-term electoral calculus, different interests and things like this. And so a free-for-all where no one has to justify violence, but just get the permission of some, you know, want-to-be emperor, it's not going to be a peaceful world. It's going to be a pretty bad I've got two more questions. We're sort of living in a post-truth era, right, where it's getting much more difficult to differentiate between truth and opinion. And put that in a context of a world where inequalities are not being remedied.

whenever there are inequalities, conversations, discussions, even discourses tend to get polarized. When things polarize, you get to the extreme left or extreme right. The guys on the left, they've been campaigning with a message of hope. But once credibility is destroyed because somebody discovered he or she plagiarism. in college. There goes to candidacy. But the guys on the right, they campaign with a message of fear and or intimidation. Yeah.

No credibility requirement. Yeah. So intuitively, one would think that the political calculus or geopolitical calculus inevitably will shift to the right in a post-truth era. That's interesting. I'm not sure I buy that. Okay. I'm not sure I buy that asymmetry.

I just want to test this. People on the left are pretty willing to believe nonsense, too, and also willing to put it out there. And ultimately, the only thing that's going to work is like a culture of fact-checking and skepticism about the source and authoritative sources. Of course, we've seen the polarization. That's been very bad, very undermining because, let's say, the New York Times now has to pander more to the people on the left in order to have their readership.

and, you know, Fox News has to pander to the people on the right to keep their readership. And the readership will complain if they have a moderate person. So that's really bad. This is where universities, I think, are really important. And we have our own problems. There have been huge problems with replication of results, with a kind of bias towards only publishing papers which have a certain kind of outcome. We actually with journal editors that say,

we won't publish that any paper which we think hurts third parties. that we hurts people we like. Scientifically good papers can't be published if we think that it's going to cause some harm, which we decide. That kind of thing is also a big structural issue. And so I feel like the institutions most devoted to truth and knowledge have to really clean ourselves up. And then we might have the authority to be the, you know, people would come to us to.

Well, what is the fact here? What is, what is happening here? And we'd recover that kind of position in society. We've also been undermined. We've been attacked viciously and falsely, but that doesn't relieve us of the obligation to get our own house in order and to recover the value of truth-seeking and truth-talking as a general thing that the societies should aspire to. Tom, a few days ago, the leadership of one of the leading AI companies made a public exhortation that, within a year or two, professions like accountants and lawyers, 50% of them are going to be wiped off. What would be your message to somebody who's studying at a law school at the University of Chicago

if he or she aspires to contribute to the law profession or legal profession? Yeah, well, first of all, I sometimes say everyone should go to law school. Because even if you don't practice law, you learn about the architecture of society. You learn about how things are structured, why they are the way they are. And that's a really important skill set, no matter what you want to do. Some of our grads go become investment bankers. Some go help homeless people. You can do so many things with just understanding how things work.

It's also the case that although there's a lot of fear about AI, and I have no way of knowing what it's going to do to the profession, we're seeing with our graduates that they're more in demand than ever. And that's because, of course, AI was is going to displace a lot of accountants and a lot of lawyers. But it's also going to reward those lawyers and accountants who do know how to to use it best. And it's going to need lawyers to understand what its ethical and legal constraints are. And so we're actually seeing that our grads are in great demand right now, which is very interesting.

So I think it's like so many other things we're going to see sort of a separating of the hemispheres between those who are serving really high value clients and such and those who are not. And in a way, it's going to exacerbate those inequalities that you started with. The inequalities are going to get worse. The inequalities can only be remedied by society-wide efforts through taxation and redistribution. And that's not a popular thing to say, but, you know, that also requires good structures of the state in order to collect the tax in order to spend the money well. But without that, we're not going to do much. I feel more hopeful. Yeah, I hope so. I'm an optimist. I repeat that because me too. What's the alternative?

awful. Must be. You've been kind with your time. I really enjoyed talking to you, Gita. Thank you so much for coming by. Friends, that was Professor Tom Ginsburg from the University of Chicago. Thank you.