The Daily Beast Podcast - Tom Nichols: Democracy is Dying Because Americans Are Narcissists

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

Tom Nichols, author of Our Own Worst Enemy, says Americans should stop blaming each other and making excuses for democracy crumbling when it’s their own damn fault—before James Madison rolls over in his grave (if the Founding Father hasn’t already). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another special bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Tom Nichols, who's a professor and author of the death of expertise as well as his new book, Our Own Worst Enemy, and we're going to talk to him all about his new book today. But before we get going, did you know that The Daily Beast has a free iOS app for Apple devices? It's streamlined, light on ads, and is hands down the best way to read The Beast. head to beast.pub dash app. That's beast.combe slash app to download today. Welcome back Tom Nichols to the new abnormal. Hey, Molly.

Good to be back with you. Hey, Tom. Very exciting to have you back. Talk to us about your new book. It's called Our Own Worst Enemy. It's the feel-good hit of the holiday season. So are you saying that liberals are their own worst enemies? I'm saying everyone's their own worst enemy.

in a democracy these days. Explain so I can disagree with you because I think you're wrong. Yeah, and it immediately went to, yes, but not us, right? And that's part of it. That, you know, the first thing people say when they hear that is they say, oh, yeah, that's true, but not us.

I think we're all looking around and saying what the Sam Hill is going on, you know, not just in the United States, but around the world with democracy. Why are things so shaky in even the UK or Italy or to say nothing, you know, Turkey, India, Brazil, Poland, Hungary. And how can it be happening here in the United States that people are kind of shrugging and saying, you know what, authoritarianism, military rule, dumping liberal democracy with a small L? Yeah, sure.

Sounds good. Let's get on with it. And I wasn't satisfied with all these explanations that were coming, ironically enough, many of the same explanations were coming from the right and the left, which were things like globalization and deindustrialization, the opioid crisis. And I thought no one has really figured out how to draw a line from that to, you know, middle class real estate agents rioting in D.C. I thought there had to be something more to this. What I found is something that had been haunting me when I wrote the book about knowledge and expertise, which is a culprit underneath all of this decline. And this goes back, this is a story goes back a good 40, 50 years now, is affluence and narcissism, that we have basically become an incredibly narcissistic society, and not just us, but the social psychologists have

actually traced this in developed countries in other parts of the world. And some of that is the outgrowth of affluence, do more things alone, you don't have to pull together, you have a lot more time to think about yourself. Ironically, this means that the real illiberal push in most countries isn't coming from the poor. It's coming from relatively well off working in middle class that just doesn't think that life is worthy of their immense talents and dreams. And so they start, you know, having these kind of tear it all down daydreams. Also offloading any responsibility. I mean, you've heard me say this before, Molly. Every time somebody complains about those guys in Washington, my answer is always, who keeps electing these people?

the voters, we're not taking any responsibility for our own choices. People that talk about neoliberalism and the rapacious big companies, they are providing us with a consumer-driven life that we want and we shouldn't. And I don't think that, but you know, to me, and I've had this argument in this same context about things like fast food. You know, why are we all obese and diabetic? Well, because we're all eating breakfast shakes and McNitz. And the answer, of course, is they all sound like the guy in Marion and X- Murder. You know, They put a chemical in it that crave it fortnightly. This feels like it's basically get off my lawn.

Well, no, it's, I think the better example is when people say I'm blaming the victim. I understand what you're saying, and I appreciate the idea. I do think it doesn't take into account all of the people who are, like, it's like the idea of secession or the idea of fleeing a hurricane. There are people who can't vote, who can't afford to flee the hurricane. who can't, who are totally disenfranchised. Like, they are not electing a Brian Kemp. We need to stop because we congratulated ourselves for getting voting up to 66% and they nudged something like 50%.

When people want to vote, yes, are there people that have to stand in line to vote who are disenfranchised? For hours and hours and hours. Yes, this is not why people don't vote. I mean, for one thing, the youth vote has been historically abysmal. It's 1974. I mean, since it was instituted, Americans just have lousy voting habits. And this is exactly the kind of conversation I'm talking about, well, you know, it's not really our fault.

And if only everybody could, hey, districts in Georgia where people have to stand in line, I understand. But you know, the other answer to that is vote in state and local elections so that you control the state legislature and the voting boards. Right. But this is a chicken or the egg scenario, right? No, I know exactly where the chicken is and where the egg is. I mean, if you look at even very liberal areas, the two examples of the,

that I always point to when people talked about Ocasio-Cortez slaying the dragon of, you know, the big money guy who was going to be the next speaker of the house, right? She did that in like 12.5% turnout primary. I'm sorry, but don't tell voting difficulties when your primaries are 12%. The way it was set up and it's changed now. We had state primaries and federal primaries on different days. Ah, there's always an excuse. There is always an excuse. In Seattle, the mayoral primary, now, of course, Seattle, right? Educated, progressive. The last mayoral primary had a turnout of like 14% with voting. And I'm not the only one that's known as Glilla at Columbia has made this point,

particularly about people on the left. They focus very heavily on the president. And they say, if we just elect the right president, he fixes all the other stuff. And then they don't show up for local, state, county elections. Look, part of the the reason Republicans do voter suppression is because it only works in marginal elections. It does not work against major turnout. And that, they know that. That voter suppression like that worked, Georgia wouldn't have two Democratic senators like that when you turn out enough people and register them to vote. This has been a small problem. I mean, I don't want to argue for, you know, an hour about voter turnout, but Americans traditionally have lousy voter turnout compared

to the rest. Again, we always talk about it as they. well, you know what they ought to do, and you know what those people should have done. And, you know, every time someone says that, I say, who's they? You mean we? You mean you? And we just don't take that kind of responsibility. And it shows not just in our voting behavior, but in the complete incoherence of our voting behavior. I talk in the book about Iowa caucus goers.

The Iowa caucus was not exactly a highlight of democracy. We still don't know who won. You can't keep dismissing all the weird, you know, moments as are just. just exceptions. These are just, it's not a, because then elsewhere in the book, I talk about a couple of Pennsylvania and a few, you know, other, other cases from around the country where the Iowa caucus voter who said, I really like Pete Buttigieg, right, Democratic caucus going. She's Pete Buttigieg. But if he doesn't win, I guess I'll vote for Donald Trump. Yeah, I remember that woman. I don't think she's the norm either, though. But you had like 10 to 12 percent of the Democratic

primary vote turning to Trump in 2016. I mean, at some point, you have to look at all of the data that goes back to the 1960s, the early 1960s, that pointed out even then two things. First of all, Americans don't really have firm ideological convictions, nor do they understand them. Also, that, you know, voting, it tends to be a kind of tribal identification. There's even a thing named after this political scientist who talked about it, the Fenno paradox, where it's people hate Congress. They hate it. Right. They do hate Congress. Not their guy. They want everybody else to fire their guy, but nobody can touch their guy. What is your goal with this book? Well, one is I'm trying to create more self-awareness in people among people in a democracy. And let's stop picking on American voters.

Italian voters voted for a comedian. Yes. That's why we love them. They elect terrible people. Berlusconi 500 times. I do not know the Italian electorate that well, but I think I know the American electorate pretty well. And we have to think about whether we're not doing the same thing. The Italians vote for a comedian. The Ukrainians vote literally for a comedian who plays on TV. Well, you know, he has experience. The Brits vote for Boris Johnson, who is the equivalent of a comedian. Except he's not very funny.

He's not funny, and he's a completely unsurious person. And he's now the prime minister of, you know, the United Kingdom. Bolsonaro, Modi. There's a voter I talk about in the book. He was interviewed by the New York Times out in California, just for 2016. And I think he spoke, he was representative, I think, of millions of people who said, look, I admit, I just want to see what will happen. I don't want people getting along with each other. I want to see fighting. And he said, he didn't agree with Trump. He tended to Hillary Clinton,

but in 2016, he said, part of me is this dark part of me just wants to see what happens when everybody fights. Yeah, well, we saw it. But I don't know that yelling at them is the way to get them to change. I'm only yelling at you. Oh, good. You're just checking. I feel like. Like the issue here, and we see this again and again, is civics education. No. No? Nope. Okay, tell me what the issue here is.

Think about it, right? The biggest problem here are people roughly my age, which is to say 35. I don't think anybody on this podcast is 35. Well, we're not that far from 35, you monster. My dear, I am 60 years old. I'm not talking about you, baby. Jesse and I are 40-ish. I'd give anything for that again.

So you look at the people that are like 55 to 70. These are the people that are watching Fox. They're sharing Facebook memes. The real root of hostility to democracy, at least in the United States, is, you know, kind of third, semi-retired, middle-aged men. These are the people who grew up when I did who had a really good civic education. I went to a public high school in a factory town, and I had to memorize Supreme Court cases in eighth grade. I had to pass civics. Amazingly, for a guy that became a political science major, I got like a C in civics because I was, you know, sort of bored by constant law.

But I had to take it in high school. The problem is not civic education. It's virtue and basically become an unvirtuous country. No, that's wrong. I'm sorry, but virtue? I mean, what century is this? That's exactly the problem. When you say virtue, pish posh, who cares about virtue?

Yeah, who cares about virtue? Fuck that. Civic virtue. I'm not talking about like, you know, how often you go to confession. I'm talking about the notion that you vote as a sense out of a sense of civic duty, that you think about your neighbor's fellow citizens, that you believe in the constitutional values of tolerance and secular government and reasoned discourse and knowledge. And that was what our whole system was based on. I mean, everyone quotes John Adams about this, right? Our constitution was made for a virtuous people. In the book, I I quote James Madison, who when he's asked about checks and balances and how to put in all these legislative barriers to people doing bad things. He out of exasperation, he says, look, I assume that we are virtuous people who will elect virtuous people. He said, and his exact line is, is there no virtue among us? If not, then we are in a wretched situation. And this is what the founders knew, that if democracy simply became this kind of grubby game of, you know, musical chairs,

where everybody's trying to steal their part of the pie and blaming everybody else for troubles in life, which a huge part of the book is about, I mean, we are got through with kind of middle class resentment about everything because we spend so much time snooping on each other's lives and so much time comparing ourselves. Once we get to that point, we're not a democracy anymore. We're just warring tribes on the battlefield. I mean, I think a lot of what you're saying is informed by a sort of newing, Englandishness, which I appreciate because I'm married to someone from Connecticut, so I can appreciate how weird you guys are.

And I am from Massachusetts and live in Rhode Island. Right, but those are New England-y places, right? They're the northeast. They're the swamp Yankees with shotguns. I mean that with all the love in the world. But these are northeastern Protestant values you're talking about here. Well, okay, I'm a working class Greek Orthodox kid from, you know, just near the New York. state border. Right, but I'm just saying they are like fundamentally sort of. These are the virtues that used to be throughout the entire nation and they are collapsing. And I present a lot of evidence in the book. There was a book that people didn't pay a whole lot of attention to about 20 years ago by a couple of scientists at the University of Nebraska who just went across the country in the early 21st century

talking to people about the condition of democracy and holding these focus groups. And it will curl your hair. People literally saying, look, I admit it, you know, I don't pay attention to this stuff. Wheel of Fortune is on. People say, on the one hand, the big problem is that our voters, our elected officials are just creeps, want to find real solutions because they want to score points. And then in the next breath say, all of us are just too stupid and lazy to figure this out, too. I mean, it is, it's terrifying to hear people in a democracy talk about themselves in this kind of shoulder shrugging, what are you going to do kind of way. Now, there's always been that.

There have always been people who are detached from the process who simply don't care or, as you point out, can't participate. Again, this revolt around the world is coming from a board middle class. And Eric Hoffer, 70 years ago, what called the true believer warned us, boredom is one of the most right additions for a mass authority. Where are you right now as a never-Trump conservative? I don't know. I hang around around all day and, you know, you guys make me grumpy.

Yes. We've noticed. I don't think of myself as a never-Trump conservative anymore. I think of myself as there are two parties in America. Right. And the pro-democrat have a lot of ideas and I don't like and policies I would disagree with. But as long as we're all agreeing, I mean, you and I and any other world be fighting. It's true.

I don't know. Democracy and, you know, the basic value. of a liberal democratic order, then that's the party I'm in. I don't like to say conservative anymore simply because that's just a subset of people who care about democracy. I mean, what the Republicans have turned into. I mean, they have turned into a kind of Marxist, big state party dominated, cult of leadership, cult of personality, whatever the leader says goes. funny that the people who talk about socialism all day, solutions for everything that are all about cycle planning, control, and obedience to the leader. So, I mean, you know, am I a conservative?

If that's what conservatism is now, I think they've lost their and become, you know, again, a kind of a centralized authoritarian party. So, you know, where am I now? I'm a pro-democracy, limited government guy who has a lot of policy ideas that I have put aside in the moment until we have re-institutionalized and secured our democratic order. And on that note, thank you so much for joining us, Tom. I'm sorry I gave you a hard time, but I know you appreciate it. It's what we do. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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