Today, Explained - No concession!

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

The 45th president of the United States has thus far refused to acknowledge the 46th. Political scientist Zeynep Tufekci explains this latest test of America’s democracy. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Multiple things can be true at once. Joe Biden can be the president-elect, while the outgoing guy refuses to acknowledge it. Americans can celebrate the results in the streets while others protest and cry foul. Canada and the United Kingdom can call Biden to congratulate him while China and Russia hold off. None of this changes the fact that Joe Biden will likely be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States this January. But American democracy is being tested right now. Some people are totally oblivious to the fact others are writing op-eds about an attempted coup.

Zeynep Tufekci finds herself somewhere in the middle. I think we should worry about what's happening for sure. She's a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm really not expecting some coup to happen, maybe because my standards for coup are a little higher. I'm from the Middle East, so I don't really expect that as part of the American experience. But that said, it really is troublesome

to have this charade go on for longer. And what I'm seeing is that the president is refusing to accept reality because it kind of cuts into his narrative, I don't lose. That doesn't mean it's okay for the GOP leadership to kind of play along. Because what I'm seeing them do is play along, but clearly understanding that there's not going to be effective legal challenges. Trump has rejected any suggestion that he has lost the election.

Instead, he continues to make claims of voter fraud with no evidence, while his campaign pursues more legal challenges to the vote count in several battleground states. They say they will continue to file lawsuits. So far, they have a diversified portfolio of litigation claiming everything from fraud to not getting access to vote counts. For the most part, judges have dismissed the lawsuits that they reviewed, saying that they're just not supported by any significant evidence. We don't need their permission to look into these allegations.

We owe it to those who voted for President Trump and the country at large to test this system. If we don't deal with voting by mail in 2020, we'll never win the White House again. Right. Let's talk about the legal challenges for a second, because there are many legal challenges, right? And the president and members of his legal team keep emphasizing all of these legal challenges. And a lot of Republicans are out there saying, count every legal vote as if there were many illegal votes cast here. Are there legitimate legal challenges thus far to this election? I'll just start by saying something that might sound not very good at this partisan moment, in that our ability to audit elections sucks, right? It is something we should have fixed after 2000. This race is simply too close to call,

and until the results, the recount is concluded and the results of Florida become official, our campaign continues. Bill Daley, the chairman of the Gore campaign, you just heard it. We're all, I think we can hardly believe our ears. It's something we should have fixed after 2016. Nearly three weeks now after election day and the recount, set to begin in Wisconsin and perhaps two more battleground states, Michigan and Pennsylvania. President-elect outraged over the recount and the Clinton team very careful to point out they are not leading this charge. There's a lot of sensible things one can do to make sure these kinds of fears, they don't

find themselves staring into a void. That's the ground on which this kind of deliberate sowing of mistrust can thrive. That said, there are really no suspicions for the kind of widespread fraud that would overturn this election or any election. And the Florida 2001 is not a good precedent at all because that was one state separated by a couple hundred votes. They know this is going to end. to an already lowering of trust in the United States towards a lot of our institutions, including our elections, is just going to get much worse. And we're all going to pay the price

for that. And they're going to pay the price for that, too, in that we're going to have a less well-functioning society. Everybody who knows anything about this knows this, including the GOP leadership. And they're just letting this go on, which is terrible. It's already happening, actually. There is a poll Politico published that says 70% of Republicans don't believe this election was free and fair. And I know this election didn't quite bolster everyone's faith in polls, but even if 50% of Republicans right now don't believe that President-elect Joe Biden is legitimate, that's a Democratic crisis. It's very troubling. And I think I've been writing,

we have to do things to restore trust in our electoral system pieces for at least 10 years, if not more. And I could literally pick one of them and publish it right now and just change a few dates and places. And it would stand because this is no way for a wealthy country to run an election. It is a week after the election and we're still in this, the provisionals, this is this and who's updated and what's going on and this glitch and that glitch. And again, while there's no evidence or reason to think there's widespread fraud, it just keeps getting worse. It's really terrible to see this happen like this. I think I know the answer, but why is it happening?

Why won't Republican leadership condemn the president's false accusations of election fraud? Why won't Republican leadership acknowledge that their friend and colleague, Joe Biden, is the president-elect of the United States? They're trying to placate the base of the Republican Party that overwhelmingly likes this person, right? This is something that may be hard to accept for, you know, a lot of people who just look at this and say, how can they like this guy? But they do. And, you know, what, 70 million people voted for him, and he's out there crying fraud and riling up people. So the Republican base, as long as that connection exists, the established Republicans, the Mitch McConnells of the world are thinking, all right, how do we not, you know, upset our

supporters who are going to vote for us in the future? And who voted for them this time, too, because of the outgoing president on some level, right? Yeah, exactly. If they were thinking country before party, this is the time to stage an intervention and say, this is it. If you have any proper legal claims, it's been a week, on the table now or make that call, concede, be gracious. And then, you know, just sort of you can declare victory, too. He can just say and he has done this. He has given them a 6-3 Republican appointed majority in the Supreme Court. The Republicans look like they're controlling the Senate. They have gained in the House. The House

Democrats have a razor thin majority and they control a large number of state legislatures. So like the Republican Party is sitting quite pretty except for the presidency and the president elect Joe Biden is something that is not an existential threat to their hold on power. So they could just declare victory and avert the crisis. And I think, again, it's just showing once you let these kinds of populist authoritarian urges and electoral politics out of the bottle, it unleashes things that are destabilizing and dangerous for the country. And I think if like they had a magic wand, they would just send them on his way and be happy. But when you have a crybaby in the White House, you cannot manage this by finessing it.

Does that end soon or does that playbook outlast this presidency? I think the playbook is quite likely here to stay. His loss is a razor thin loss in a couple of states. And that's really important to sort of recognize because voting one person out of office may feel good. But if you have a structural problem, it's quite possible that there will be others. Others without the same kind of liabilities he has, which is being incompetent this strong man, celebrity often, somebody with the kind of ability to generate a loyal following with this disregard for the regular institutions of centrist liberal democracy and win elections, right? This happens around the world and there's no reason to think this won't happen here

again in 2024, 2028. The playbook is there, and it's something that's on the rise around the world. More with Zeynep in a minute. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Zeynep, before the break, you were saying that despite what a lot of Americans might think, if you look around the world, the outgoing president's leadership style isn't exactly unique. How would you contextualize it? Well, I would say this is almost textbook authoritarian populism. And some of the outlines of this are you promise more support for the people, which is often defined, you know, around the world as your supporters. The thing that I think distinguishes Trump from his counterparts around the world, if you want to look at like Orban in Hungary,

you want to look at Bolsonaro in Brazil, you want to look at Erdogan in Turkey, is that those people are talented and competent politicians, right? Trump is not that. Remember infrastructure week? I don't actually. Right? Like, exactly. That's my point is that the other politicians who run on this deliver something to their supporters and they win elections again. Whereas Trump was more interested in, I don't know, bookings in his hotel than what happened in Wisconsin, right, to the working class there. He just tweeted about it and he announced this or that there, but he didn't really follow through with any of it in an effective way.

And had he followed through, it's quite possible that he could have cruised into re-election. And once again, I want people to sort of understand this. He lost by a razor thin margin in a couple of states. And had he been slightly more competent, like had he used the pandemic as what a lot of strong men can do, crisis, I'm here for you, and just kind of said, all right, I'll rescue you, and taken some effective actions early on, I think he could have really easily won. And people need to understand the Republican Party consolidated its gains across the board from the Supreme Court to state legislatures. The GOP has this enormous hold on power that is aided by the anti-majoritarian and minority boosting elements of our constitution, which include the Senate and are boosted by deliberate things like redistricting. So this is this is a dangerous kind of environment to have.

Why was this still a very successful election for the Republicans when he didn't really deliver on his populist promise? What he delivered were tax cuts and a lot of rhetoric about a wall that still hasn't been successfully built. that the CARES Act was quite successful. I don't think people have kind of internalized this, but for so many people, their household finances are better right now than before the pandemic, because there was a big welfare state-like spending through that legislation. Like, if you look at the household finances, and if you look at people, if they're asked, are you doing better now economically than four years ago, the majority of people say yes, which is in fact striking, because when you have so many people, a majority say they're doing better financially compared to four years ago, it's almost unheard of for an incumbent to lose despite that, right? So what I'm saying is that had he been slightly better at the presentation part and not turned off so many people with the

vulgarity and everything else, he could have been cruising into election. The second thing is, I don't think Democratic Party and most people understand what they're facing, which is a successful populist political realignment in this country that is not losing, it is making gains. I think on the Democratic side of the aisle, there's a lot of denial about the actual state of politics in this country. And that denial may well be boosted by having won against President Trump by a razor thin margin and may blind people to these underlying currents that are still there and very strong. And in 2024, we'll be having this discussion again because the opposition, both in his party and the opposition party, the Democratic Party, does not rise to the challenge of effective politics against the strain of populism.

And what might that strain look like next in America? Well, economically speaking, it would be a similar set of promises, right? A recognition that globalization hasn't worked for everybody in this country. The way he talks about corruption, those all resonate. But you can imagine a version of this that has the same rhetoric and isn't, for example, say, as overtly racist in the rhetoric as he has been. It would be someone with the charisma and the media following, it could be someone like Tucker Carlson's of the world, who have a very similar economic populist talk. And I hate to be like this downer person, just warning and warning.

But the reality is, like, it's a movie we have seen before around the world. And in some ways, it was almost lucky for the United States to have gotten an incompetent version of this populist right-wing ethno-nationalist. The next one will not be this easy because a lot of talented politicians are looking at this and saying, I could go through that door. So how can all this momentum be slowed down? I mean, you know, can this be fixed? I'm a professor and I'm going to say this kind of slightly self-deprecating, but I mean this. I think a lot of people in the democratic institutions, think tanks, NGOs, running the campaigns are very good students. And there's this expectation that somebody will come and give them a good grade

because things were unfair and they tried. And I just want to say, nobody's going to come and say, yeah, the Senate is unfair. You know, here's your A. That's not how it's going to work. The Senate is unfair and the job is to figure out how to make it more fair, despite the fact that, yes, it is unfair, and nobody's going to wave a magic wand and fix this. And the sooner they recognize this reality and just say, all right, you know, complaining about this isn't going to get us anywhere, we can point it out as a part of our electoral strategy, but you can only go so far with that, too. And how do you create the kind of moment where you can fix this, right? The kind of moment where you have the presidency, where you have the Senate,

where you have state legislatures and you pass the Voting Rights Act that's federal and that fixes a lot of whatever can be fixed. Just being well-meaning is not enough to fix things. Be recognizing reality and saying, okay, things aren't fair, things aren't great, but here we are. That's the first step to digging out. But don't a lot of people not want to dig out? A lot of people don't find the Senate unfair. Something like 70 million people in this country said, keep things the way they are, right? Don't a lot of people like it this way? A lot of people may like it that way, but I think we need to make the case that a lower functioning society that gets every year is not good for anyone, even if they are temporarily on the winning side of their

own political party. It's not good for any of us to have a country that can't handle a pandemic response, despite, you know, being home to CDC, previously the stellar public health organization. And this is true, like, just at so many levels. This is not to anyone's benefit. What does that mean, though? Like a lower functioning society?

I mean, people probably look at this society and don't think it's very functional. See, no, no. Okay, so let's just be fair here. A lot of people are still trying to come here for a reason, right? There's a reason that people try to immigrate to the United States. So if people think that this is some non-functioning society and that's just the way it is, I want to say as someone not from this country, this is not the baseline of low functioning, right? This is in many ways a wealthy country that has a lot of advantages and a lot of

things like it's losing, but it's losing from a relatively high point for a lot of people. So I am not like making light of the existing problems. But when you look at sort of the rest of the world by any measure, we're nowhere near the bottom or even the middle. Like it's a wealthy country with lots of things that work that are getting worse. Remind me what it will look like when it gets worse because it seems bad right now i don't have a crystal ball on what it would look like but if we don't fix it it's not going to get better it's going to get worse okay zaynab i appreciate it thanks for entertaining my plea to see your crystal ball sorry about that but i just want to say like this is not the hopeless

thing it just requires realism. You can't do it through nostalgia. There are a lot of things that were wrong before. So I'm not saying, well, let's go back to 20. It's not pearl clutching, right? I'm not wishing for some past. The past was more racist. The past was more sexist. Like, I'm not wishing for that.

But you have to look forward with realism. And once you do that, then you can start trying to reverse this vicious cycle and create a positive one where things improve and then get better in turn. Zeynep Tuveksi, she's a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and she's got a newsletter called Insight where you can read more of her work. You can find it at zeynep.substack.com. Zeynep is Z-E-Y-N-E-P. Once again, for the Commonwealth, Z-E-Y-N-E-P.substack.com. And just a reminder that all the major news networks, including Fox News, have called the election for Joe Biden. But if you're still worried about his chances with all the delegitimizing going on,

here are the dates to watch. The states must certify their results by December 8th and the Electoral College votes December 14th. The outgoing guy can sue all he wants until then, but once things are figured out, they've closed the books historically. Congress rubber stamps in early January. Inauguration January 20th.

I'm Sean Ramos Firm. It's Today Explained.