American Futures (Ken Taylor Memorial Episode)

Josh Landy
Where is America headed as a nation?

Ray Briggs
Are we on the brink of tyranny? A national divorce? A civil war?

Josh Landy
What can we do to bring about some brighter days?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area…

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, it’s a special edition of the program inspired by our late colleague, co-host and friend Ken Taylor and made possible by support from the Ken Taylor Memorial Fund. We’re thinking about American futures.

Josh Landy
At the time of his sudden passing in 2019, Ken was working on a book he’d titled “Farewell to the Republic We Once Dreamed of.” He explained some of his motivation for it and a blog post a year earlier. He said, “On my bad days, I think that there was little hope for America—primarily because so many Americans don’t really like other Americans very much at all. Indeed, they’ve completely lost the ability to speak to each other.”

Ray Briggs
So in the spirit of Ken’s unfinished work, we’ll spend today’s episode considering what the future might hold for the American Republic. And to be clear, a lot of it ain’t pretty.

Josh Landy
Later in the program, we’ll talk to experts on how civil wars start and how authoritarian regimes take hold in previously-democratic states. We’ll also consider whether United States can—or even should—keep it together as one nation.

Ray Briggs
But it’s not all doom and gloom, and by the end of the show, we’ll also sketch out what might change in the near term to bring America back from the brink of its darkest possible futures.

Josh Landy
To get us started on thinking about where we’re headed, we sent our Roving Philosophical Teporter Holly J. McDede to listen to where we’ve been in the US in 2023. She files this report.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
It’s therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.

Sam Altman
GPT-4 takes what you prompt it with and just runs with it. From one perspective, it’s a tool or thing you can use to get useful tasks done in language. It’s both exhilarating as well as terrifying. People should be happy that we’re a little bit scared of this.

Fran Drescher
I cannot believe it, how they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs.

Mikki Fletchall
We are the frontline healthcare workers and we are struggling. We’re exhausted. We have been through the pandemic shorthanded and we have still been showing up shorthanded.

Anderson Cooper
Donald J. Trump is under arrest.

Stephen Colbert
He was read his Miranda rights. Then he claimed that Miranda wasn’t even his type, asked her to sign an NDA, and got indicted again.

Jimmy Kimmel
Wait until he finds out all this time he had the right to remain silent. He’s gonna kick himself!

US House
The total number of votes cast is 428, of which the Honorable Kevin McCarthy of the State of California has received 216.

Kevin McCarthy
That was easy, huh!

US House
The resolution is adopted. The Office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.

NBC News
Israelis woke up today to find their worst nightmares had come true. Palestinian gunmen are inside Israeli cities and towns.

Today
Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip relentlessly targeting Hamas leaders hitting the border crossing with Egypt where Palestinians are trying desperately to get out.

Journalist
Do you want Israel the scale that gets to assault on Gaza in by the end of the year? Do you want them to tone it down?

Joe Biden
I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives. Not stop going after Hamas but be more careful.

The Beatles
I know it’s true, it’s all because of you.

Ringo Starr
It’s like John’s there, you know—it’s far out.

Paul McCartney
It’s probably like the last Beatles song.

CBS News
The world is marking the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, born at a party in the blocks back in 1973.

Hip-Hop
From that fateful basement back on Cedric Avenue, hip hop as we knew it was born.

Eras Tour
Welcome to the Eras Tour!

Taylor Swift
This has been the most extraordinary experience of my entire life.

CBS News
This year she was like politics or the weather, meaning she’s about the topics that everybody talks about all the time.

Barbie
Hey Barbie, can I come to your house tonight? Sure! It’s the best day ever. It is the best day ever! So it’s yesterday and so is tomorrow and everyday for national forever! Do you ever think about dying?

Oppenheimer
Our work here will ensure a piece mankind has never seen… until somebody builds a bigger bomb

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ray Briggs
Thanks for that bracing tour of the American year past, Holly. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And today, we’re thinking about American futures in honor of our late colleague and co-host, Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
You know, Ray, some of what we just heard is encouraging. But some of its pretty troubling,

Ray Briggs
Right, you might even worry that the fabric of American society is starting to fall apart.

Josh Landy
Could we even be headed for civil war?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Barbara Walter. She’s Professor of International Affairs at the School of global policy and strategy at UC San Diego, and author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.” We asked her why she thinks America is on the verge of a civil war.

Barbara Walter
I’ve studied civil wars around the globe for the last 30 years. And for five years, I served on a task force run by the CIA called the political instability Task Force. And one of its main goals was to come up with a predictive model that would help the US government predict what countries around the world were likely to experience political instability, and political violence. And that model was actually quite good. It had about an 80% success rate and in predicting what countries were going down this path. And it turns out that actually only two factors really matter.

Josh Landy
All right, what are those two factors?

Barbara Walter
So one was something called anocracy. That’s just a fancy term for partial democracy. And the second factor was whether citizens in these partial democracies, organized politically around ethnicity, religion, or race and not around ideology. So it would be a country like Yugoslavia, right after the Soviet Union collapsed, that was trying desperately to democratize. It had elements of democracy, but it still had elements of autocracy. And then you the slab citizens, rather than forming parties around whether people were more inclined to be Communist or Capitalist, liberal or conservative. They formed parties based on whether they were a Serb or Croat or a Bosnian Muslim. So those were the two factors that tended to indicate that a country was heading down the path towards instability and violence.

Josh Landy
So when it comes to the United States, specifically, and the current moment, there are a couple of additional things or more specific things that I would have in mind is factors, one of which is essentially calls for violence, warnings of civil war calls for civil war. So you know, a former candidate for VP saying, you want to be in a civil war, because that’s what’s going to happen, we need to rise up and take our country back. And this sort of the rash of acts of politically motivated and motivated violence, like, like at Charlottesville, or what happens, Paul Pelosi or even the insurrection? Yeah. How do those things factor in future? They seem unusual? Do they seem normal? Do they seem like harbingers of a potential Civil War?

Barbara Walter
Um, they’re not unusual. They are sort of the observable indicators that some pretty scary stuff is happening behind the scenes, we actually know who tends to start civil wars, and it’s not the people that most people think it’s not the poorest groups in society, it’s not the most heavily discriminated groups, it’s certainly not immigrants. All three of those types of groups definitely are have reasons to want to rebel. Their problem is that they don’t have the capacity. They’re poor, they’re struggling, the government tends to watch them very carefully, because they think they might cause trouble. The groups that tend to start civil wars are the groups that had once been politically dominant, but are in decline. And that could happen for lots of reasons. So immigration and changing demographics, often precipitate this and and the group that is losing demographically, especially in democracies, and especially in democracies based on majority rule where the winner takes all you know, many of them feel that it’s their right to rule that they were the founding group of a country and therefore, they should legitimately rule and so when that demographic change is happening, and you have a declining majority, a declining dominant group. They’re trying to work within the system. If you look historically, they work within the system as long as the system serves them. And when it starts not to serve them, meaning they start to lose elections, they start to not have the numbers to defeat other groups in their country, then you have what we call violence entrepreneurs, the more radical individuals in that group who begin to start the narrative, that the system isn’t working, the system is broken, that, you know, we’re gonna have to do something else to hold on to power. And they will say that violence because of their position in society, that violence is a legitimate means for them to hold on to control. So by the time you start hearing, you know, people in leadership positions saying, you know, we’re going to take our country back, you know, a civil wars is on the horizon. This demographic change has often been taking place for quite some time. And and the movement is becoming more desperate, because they’re seeing that working within the system is no longer working.

Ray Briggs
So the US has had a civil war before based on southern white slaveholders, not wanting to give up their power. But that was geographically divided, and the US doesn’t seem geographically divided in the same way. Now, can you tell us some things about how a civil war now would look different from our first Civil War? If it’s not too depressing? This is a first Civil War. Like there’s another one.

Barbara Walter
Exactly, exactly. You know, oftentimes people tell me, they’re like, Well, another civil war isn’t going to happen. Because secession today, you know, can’t happen. Well, it’s not going to happen. What we have in the 21st century, tends to look much more like insurgencies. And insurgencies are sort of lower grade civil wars, they tend to be decentralized, they tend to be fought by militias, using guerrilla warfare using domestic terror where they they consciously target certain groups, minority groups, opposition leaders, anybody who’s standing in the way of them continuing to hold power. And so it looks more like what you saw, for example, in Northern Ireland during their civil war, which they write for reasons I don’t understand called the troubles, or it looks more like what you saw in Israel, with Hamas using terror attacks, you know, suicide bombing, bus attacks, you know, attacks on on infrastructure, and markets, then it will ever look like what we saw in the 1860s, which was really a very, very unusual type of civil war.

Josh Landy
But, you know, what do you say to the people who say, you know, you’re you’re being alarmist, there’s nothing to worry about. We’re overreacting. You know, even if something were to start, the military would intervene, right with this, this, this country isn’t going to fall apart, you can’t have a secession, if any trouble breaks out, the military will, will will put it down. What do you what do you say to people like that? Who say, just don’t, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen? And

Barbara Walter
Well, I wish they were right. I wish it were the case that if we just put our heads in the sand and just thought about, you know, rainbows and unicorns, that life would turn out. All right. And of course, that’s what the radicals want us to do. Right? They want us to be distracted, they want us to feel like there is no growing cancer in our society, because that gives them time to organize. And that gives them time to train. But if you look at the data and the data on everything from the number of militias around the country, to the number of hate crimes to the rate of domestic terror, every measure has been increasing since about 2008. So we have hard data showing that in fact, there’s significant growth out there. We now know that January 6 was not an uncoordinated event with just lots of individuals going to DC on that day. No, there was lots of coordination. In fact, it was the first time that some of the biggest militias, the proud boys, three percenters, were actually kind of forming an alliance against the federal government. So we have the data. And then I think if you look back there was this fabulous op ed written by, I think, five former generals, and they they crossed, you know, all both party lines, who who said that one of their greatest fears was that if war broke out, that the military would not remain neutral that what they were seeing within their own ranks was increasing divisions, and that they couldn’t guarantee that the military wouldn’t break into two different sides and begin to support whoever their preferred side was so that they would not, we couldn’t count on the military to be a neutral intervener. To stop this from happening.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to a special edition of Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about American futures in honor of our late colleague, co host and friend, Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
e’ve been talking with Barbara Walter from UC San Diego, author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.” We’ll hear more of that conversation… when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about American Futures, a special episode in honor of our late colleague, co-host and friend, Ken Taylor. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Let’s get back to our conversation with Barbara Walter from UC San Diego, author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them”—specifically, on what we can do to prevent a second American Civil War.

Barbara Walter
I actually think that the single easiest thing that we could do right now, given that we have a short time span, probably, is to regulate social media. If you look at when democracies around the world started to decline, that was in 2010, if you look to see when hate speech began to increase, when it became easier to join militias, if you look at all of these data points that are indicating that we’re heading down a dangerous path, most of them are happened at the time that that not only social media came onto the scene, but more importantly, when algorithms began to be developed, that that disproportionately favored information that was more extreme, more incendiary, that, that increasingly fed people, you know, one particular viewpoint and then an increasingly extreme point of view, in that in that information silo, so we regulate all sorts of industries, every other form of media is regulated, we regulate the food industry, we regulate any industry that that we know is harmful to society, we are increasingly seeing the the negative societal effects of algorithms that are designed to keep people engaged on their phone, whether or not that’s healthy or not. And I think that could go a long way, in the short term, to tamping down, the divisiveness that we’re not only seeing here in the United States, but in every country around the world.

Josh Landy
These sounds to my ears like excellent proposals, but as you say, politically speaking, they’re very hard to enact. And I wonder whether we just aren’t frightened enough as a society. I, you know, I remember back in, you know, in 2016, after the election, some folks are warning, you know, we could be in for a bumpy ride. And a lot of folks said, You’re just being alarmist and, you know, then a pandemic hit and 10s, or maybe even hundreds of 1000s died unnecessarily. Then in 2020, a bunch of the same folks are saying, you know, we could be in for a bumpy ride around the election. Yeah, just being melodramatic, and what happens, and insurrection. And now we’re in a moment where those same people are saying, you know, we could be in for authoritarianism or even civil war. And once again, you’re overreacting. So what piece of evidence do you find the most compelling to convince me you know, what, don’t be, don’t be completely terrified. The point you can’t do anything, you’re just caught up in a fetal position in the corner but but be alarmed enough to start taking action and pressuring you know, putting pressure on your representatives to make these changes in government putting pressure on the social media companies to start regulating? What do you say to them?

Barbara Walter
I mean, I would say Google domestic terrorism in the United States, Google. Going back to Timothy McVeigh, the way the media has tended to portray terrorist attacks the United States is as idiosyncratic isolated events, and they simply are not Timothy McVeigh had pages from The Turner Diaries in his pickup truck when he bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The Turner Diaries is a fictitious account of a civil war in the United States it is considered the Bible of the far right. It is considered their blueprint for how small weak militia groups can defeat a much more powerful government with a powerful military. Timothy McVeigh was part of that movement, he was probably a member of, of one of the big Michigan militias that also had their hand in the attempt to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Look carefully and you’ll see that there’s a thread going through this and that it’s been growing since 2008, and that they’re now starting to coordinate their activity. And if we have, you know, a civil war, which will look like an insurgency, it’s going to be a more consistent series of domestic terrorist attacks against particular groups throughout the country. And so when you hear about a market of an African American market being bombed in Buffalo, or Latinos being attacked, in El Paso or synagogue being bombed in Pittsburgh, these are not isolated. This is part of a growing white supremacist movement in the United States of white nationalism moving to the United States. That is intent on taking their country back. And so, you know, I do think we have to stop denying that this could happen in the United States. We’d love to think that our country is special in many ways it is, but we’ve already had one civil war and and many of the issues that drove the first Civil War are still there. So this thought that we could never have another one I think is foolhardy.

Josh Landy
Barbara, I’d love to think that you’re wrong. But I know that you’re right. We all need to take this really seriously. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Barbara Walter
Yes, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Bob Dylan
I crossed the green mountain, I slept by the stream.

Ray Briggs
Barbara Walter from UC San Diego, author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about American futures, in honor of our late colleague, co host and friend, Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
You know, the prospect of a Northern Ireland style Civil War is pretty terrifying to me, Ray. I really hope the work Barbara is doing is going to help us avoid that as a nation.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, me too. But even if we don’t end up in a civil war, things could still get pretty bad, at least for a lot of us. We could end up living in an authoritarian state.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Tamsin Shaw. She is professor of philosophy at NYU, and an expert on oligarchy and an unchecked executive authority. We started by asking her to define authoritarianism.

Tamsin Shaw
It’s when you have a concentration of political power, either in one person or a small group of people, and no accountability, no checks and balances. So we’ve seen a lot of different examples of how that could work around the world, but very broadly, it’s just the inability to have any check on that person with sovereign authority.

Ray Briggs
And how would that most likely play out in the US?

Tamsin Shaw
In the US, I think it would play out in the way that we see dictatorships playing out across the world with this semblance of democracy. So even Putin has to pretend to be elected. There’s a great book on this actually by Sergey Grier and Daniel Treisman, the, the way in which people now use fake democratic legitimacy. But it has to still look a little bit fake, so people don’t take it too seriously. It’s quite a sophisticated phenomenon, in some ways that it would be really easy for Trump or somebody else to achieve that here.

Josh Landy
And so okay, if we slide into this authoritarianism, what are some of the practical consequences? Obviously, we would lose our ability to make any meaningful difference at the ballot box. I mean, I you know, I’ve read some pretty chilling stories about plans that some groups have underway already, in case a Republican wins the presidency in 2024. So this pPoject 2025 thing, which apparently would involve, you know, the use of the insurrection act to so that the military can quell any protests, the eliminate elimination of the independence of federal agencies, like the FTC, the FTC, the FDA, using the DOJ to pursue political enemies, replacing folks in the federal civil service with with loyalists so that you’d have this unprecedented degree of control of the presidency over the executive and And thereby over the entire country. Does that seem a plausible scenario to you? Could that could it happen here?

Tamsin Shaw
It’s not just plausible to me, I think what scares me is how easily most of that could happen without people even noticing it very much. I mean, the average American probably doesn’t think that much about the Constitution of the DOJ, or any of those federal agencies. And Trump could probably staff them pretty quickly if they really have lined up people with loyalists, and and a lot of people might not really experience a difference at first.

Ray Briggs
This sounds like a really bad scenario. And I kind of want to talk about what makes it bad. So one thing that makes it bad is it’s just, it would cause a lot of immediate suffering, like anybody who was thrown in jail for protesting, would not do well in jail. But it seems like there are kind of other things at stake, too. Could you help me out in naming what would be really bad about this?

Tamsin Shaw
I mean, in terms of taking away people’s rights, first of all, Trump, or whoever could have available the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus that in the world more sophisticated than China’s if he just took control of the Silicon Valley, big five. And people will be happily carrying on giving him their data without really thinking about the fact at first, this they’re giving it to an authoritarian dictator and not a private company. And that would enabled him and his administration to identify any of the people that they want to persecute, they clearly want to prosecute the opposition, but also there were a lot of very vulnerable groups, trans people, gay people, there’s an enormous amount of racism evident now. And we’re just seeing the anti semitism bubbling up. So I think in terms of what he might do to those groups, certainly persecution of various kinds, but also I think, seizing people’s assets would be probably a very big one for Trump.

Josh Landy
And it sounds like you’re saying, because, you know, I, when I talk about this with folks, you know, I think many of them are, are deeply worried by it. They they recognize it as a very real possibility. They look to the example of Russia, which for a little while, was a democratic state, and then more or less overnight, change into what we see today. And they think, Yeah, could happen here. But many people seem very sanguine. They think no, you know, America is a strong country, great country, a great tradition of democracy. How could it possibly so are we basically the, you know, the boiled frog? Are we are we a frog in a pot that’s getting hot, and we don’t notice it? Because we’ve become so used to the gradual stripping away of our of our democratic rights over the last, you know, couple of decades that you’ve got, you’ve got gerrymandering, and you’ve got voting restrictions, you’ve got, you know, effective nullification of elections. Are we just getting so I don’t know, desensitized to this creeping infringement of our rights, that it’s eventually it’s going to happen. And people, as you say, won’t even notice.

Tamsin Shaw
Yeah, I mean, that’s a big worry of mine. I think people can look at Russia and say, Well, that was never a mature democracy. And we are. So there’s going to be a lot more opposition to authoritarianism here. But as you say, we’ve already started losing so much, and just not really being afraid. I mean, just when Trump was in office and taking control of effectively of the Supreme Court and a lot of the judiciary and the long term project to take over the state legislatures. Nobody’s been concerned about these big moves that the GOP have been making in the direction of authoritarianism. I would have thought that from day one of Biden’s administration’s priority would have been making sure that we’re still a democracy after 2024. And the Democrats just don’t seem to have prioritized this enough. I mean, I always thought that having a directly elected executive was a bad idea anyway, compared to parliamentary systems where the parties appoint their leader. That’s because I know Yeah, right. But it does make you very vulnerable to populism and the concentration of powers in the presidency now is just insane.

Ray Briggs
This is all deeply discouraging, in some ways. Should we be turning our attention instead to preparing to continue to be decent human beings to each other under an authoritarian state? Like is that where our energy should be right now?

Tamsin Shaw
Well, I think we should really try to make sure we were not in that position. But certainly that’s something that we’ll have to do if we are living under an authoritarian state. And that might limit the power that it has. Although I don’t know I mean, if you read any book about the Stasi, for instance, it’s so easy to get the system to run by itself by having people be terrified of their neighbors surveilling them and turning them in, or just this whole invisible apparatus of power that turns people against one another.

Josh Landy
Do you also worry at all about creeping authoritarianism on the far left, right. I mean, there’s some concerns today, for example, that there’s a growing segment of the far left that doesn’t care as much as it used to or should do about freedom of speech and other kinds of democratic value like that. So what would you say about that?

Tamsin Shaw
Well, I would say that, that we’re always on the left some illiberal tendencies. And they don’t necessarily constitute a large part for the left. And I think what we’re seeing in terms of people, suppressing free speech, supposedly, is a kind of intolerance for racism and homophobia and sexism at a time when the right have very much pushing back against their kind of ban on talking about that. So I think it’s a reaction to the write partly, and worried does to bover into a liberal attitudes, I still don’t think it’s remotely comparable to what we’re seeing on the right because they don’t want to use the state’s power to enforce their views. They don’t want to get rid of the First Amendment. Whereas the right really does want to take down the Constitution. And I think Trump’s news, that slogan as the rules have changed, and the left doesn’t want to fundamentally change the rules.

Ray Briggs
Tamsin, this has been certainly a call to awareness and a call to action. Thank you so much for joining us.

Tamsin Shaw
Thank you, Ray.

Ray Briggs
Tamsin Shaw, from NYU, on the risks of an authoritarian America. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And we’re thinking about American futures in honor of our late colleague, co-host and friend, Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
Coming up: can America keep it together as one nation? should it? And what would it take to see brighter days ahead?

Ray Briggs
More American futures… when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Welcome back, I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about American Futures—a special episode in honor of our late colleague, co-host and friend, Ken Taylor,

Josh Landy
Ken called for an entirely fresh start. He said, We must build a new American republic, one with an entirely different constitution, and an entirely different civic ethos. But right, we’ve just heard from Tamsin Shaw, that the future may be tyranny. And we’ve heard from Barbara Walter, that it may be civil war like Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Ken’s dream, I gotta say, it seems increasingly unlikely.

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, tyranny and Civil War both sound pretty awful. Don’t you think there are any other options?

Josh Landy
Well, there is one option: national divorce.

Ray Briggs
National divorce? As in separating into two countries? Why would somebody want that?

Josh Landy
Well, I’m not calling for that. I’m just saying it’s a possible future. And I imagine its defenders would say, look, everyone’s gonna be happy, right? I mean, one country could build a giant border wall no taxes to zero deregulate all industries and drill, baby drill. And the other country could have universal health care, gun legislation, bodily autonomy for women emission standards, and livable minimum wage.

Ray Briggs
That’s very pie in the sky, Josh. But look, the two parties cannot even agree with themselves. If you have two new countries, they’re just gonna fracture until left versus far left and right versus far right. And then you’ll have to have four countries. Where does it end?

Josh Landy
I don’t know if that’s gonna happen, Ray. I mean, okay. Look in America right now. It’s pretty intense. Right? Party a thinks party B is trying to indoctrinate its children. Party B thinks party is getting them killed by denying climate change spreading vaccine misinformation. Shouldn’t letting private citizens carry weapons of war that that’s pretty intense stuff. But if each became a country, yeah, they’d still be disagreement, but at regular levels, healthy kinds of debate,

Ray Briggs
Look, even if that were true, it would still be a really cruel thing to do. It’s not like all the Democrats live in 25 states and all the Republicans live in the other 25 people are just mixed together and scattered all over.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s true. But the borders wouldn’t have to follow state lines. The US is already a non contiguous country, you could just expand that out.

Ray Briggs
Oh, no, that’s even crazier. How would you patrol all those borders to stop guns coming into country number one, and who gets to be part of which military? And when country number two, just drill for oil and national parks? Everything is too interconnected. You can’t just wall yourself off from chaos.

Josh Landy
Well, I admit there are a lot of complexities here. And I’m not advocating for a national divorce. But I can understand people thinking, yeah, maybe it’s the lesser of two evils. If Mum and Dad are fighting all the time, and the house is falling apart. Maybe everybody’s better off if they separate.

Ray Briggs
Okay, Josh, but are we really at that point, America has gone through crises before, and it’s always managed to hang together? Why not this time?

Josh Landy
Well remember what Barbara Walter was telling us a moment ago, we’ve got some pretty well situated people actually calling for civil war. We’ve got political violence on the rise. We’ve got institutions on the wane all the signs of imminent chaos.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but what if everything turns out okay? Aren’t you just gonna feel foolish if you get worked up about nothing?

Josh Landy
You know, philosopher John-Pierre Dupuy calls this the paradox of doomsaying. When you see a catastrophe on the horizon, you sound the alarm as loud as you can. You try to convince as many people as possible to stop it from happening. If you succeed, everyone tells you, you’re an idiot for worrying so much. It’s like the y2k bug. A bunch of people work night and day to fix it. So nothing actually failed on January 1 2000. And now it’s become a bit of a joke, but the only reason it’s a joke is that we stopped the bad thing from happening by doomsaying.

Ray Briggs
I don’t know… National divorce still seems like a huge price to pay. And the outcome is desperately uncertain. Just look at what happened with Brexit.

Josh Landy
Yeah, okay, that didn’t go so great. But still, what if the choice is between that and tyranny as far as the eye can see, once you lose democracy, it can take decades to get it back. It can even take really bad things happening.

Ray Briggs
I have met people who would say that that sounds like a lot of left-wing doom-mongering.

Josh Landy
But this isn’t a left versus right thing. Plenty of people on the right are desperately worried about authoritarianism. Mitt Romney, Christine Todd Whitman, Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie will heard Michael Steele, some Republicans have even sacrificed their careers to stopping it like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. This isn’t left versus right. It’s democracy versus tyranny.

Ray Briggs
I don’t know I still prefer Ken’s solution, a new America that values democracy.

Josh Landy
Me too. Let’s pray for the good outcome, but prepare for the bad.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And we’re thinking about American futuresin honor of our late colleague, co-host and friend, Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
So far, we’ve heard some rather worrying visions of the American future tyranny, Civil War national divorce, we thought it might be nice to see if anyone sees things looking up.

Ray Briggs
Rob Reich is a professor of political science at Stanford and a longtime friend of Philosophy Talk. We asked him to tell us about some rays of hope he sees in America’s near term future.

Rob Reich
You know, as a philosopher, we’re not given as a tribe to dispositional optimism, you know, much more Gramscian skepticism of the intellect, optimism of the will. But I’m going to give you my optimism of the intellect take here, I think there is a genuine chance maybe even a, you know, decent probability, that in 2025, we emerge into something that approaches normal politics in America. And the scenario goes like this, the leader of the Democratic Party right now President Biden has to win the 2024 election. And assuming that happens, that sets in motion the following sequence of events. The Republican Party, which has to date not summoned the courage to sanction its own in group member who is a strong norm violator, of course, that’s President Trump will have to reflect upon the fact that three successive elections it has lost significantly and underperformed down ballot. And so after losing in 2024, Republican Party leaders will have to confront Trumpism in a way that they never had done previously. And in the meantime, on the Democratic Party’s I will have a second term for President Biden. And he’s of course ineligible to run again. And we have wide bipartisan complaints about gerontocracy. So the references rule by old people, rule by old people, which is unambiguous in American politics. So we’ll have the dynamic of the Republican Party that that forces them to be a bit more moderate and confront Trumpism. We have a dynamic in the Democratic Party, which is anti gerontocracy. And not to mention the rule that prevents Biden from running again. And it so happens that we have a pretty wide bench of young, decent and moderate leaders in both parties who might step to the fore in 2025 2026, with a widespread desire on the American populations part for something like decent normal politics. And I wouldn’t say this is a guarantee. And as I say, all this depends upon the Democratic Party winning in 2024. But it’s a dynamic that I could easily see playing out if that sequence begins.

Ray Briggs
Other than the Democratic Party winning, are there conditions that we should be trying to bring about to encourage the other parts of this to happen?

Rob Reich
There’s nothing that the out party, the Democrat or you know, non Republican hasn’t tried already. Norm violators have to be sanctioned most strongly by the elites have their own in group. And the Republican Party leadership has utterly failed at this. So what we could do is try to support and encourage those insiders in the Republican Party to have the courage of the Constitution and the rule of law to sanction their in party norm violator. It could be something simple and material that if people make an effort to try to sanction their in group norm violator, and they were too fail, that there will be a promise of you know, material security and employment once they are expelled from their own party and insist upon a populism in favor of something far more moderate in politics, rather than the highly contentious, polarized debate we have now.

Ray Briggs
So it seems like part of this scenario is getting Americans to be less polarized. And some of this falls on our leaders. Do you have encouragement for our listeners about how to fight polarization, sort of as regular people, like most of us, aren’t politicians or elected officials? Is there are there things we can do to talk to our families?

Rob Reich
Well, when we think about this, I think about the kind of proverbial holiday dinner table at some level and meeting across lines of political difference and making a good faith effort to both understand rival points of view, but to insist upon our basic common humanity and our common hopes for the future. The more realistic take is that, you know, this will be facilitated by external threats to the United States, whether it’s the rise of China, the rise of artificial intelligence, that could be a mortal peril, you know, conflict in the Middle East, something that would seem to threaten us interests as a whole would be, you know, perversely, a kind of salutary effect on for grounding, the commonality we have as citizens and the interests we have collectively in a less polarized discourse. So that’s not much of a bomb for anybody who wants to sort of try to enact this in their ordinary everyday lives. But I guess I would just try to say that that the trivial but nevertheless, true orientation of meeting each other with kindness and grace, can’t be said enough.

Josh Landy
That’s fair enough. I guess I have one piece of support for your optimism, but also one worry. So a piece of support might come from the United Kingdom, where we’ve seen the Labour Party actually clean its own house up I mean, depending of course, on which end of the Labour Party someone feels like they belong to but we’ve seen the centrists in the Labour Party, take pretty significant action, to downplay the influence of folks on the fringes and in particular, of the anti semitism that was pretty rife in the Labour Party at one point, so that could be that can be a model and maybe that could happen here. On the other hand, more troubling me, you know, you talk about external threats, bringing us together and getting people serious, but we’ve got climate change happening at a rising pace, and that doesn’t seem to be having the kind of impact we would want. And in terms of global political threats, we’ve seen a former president walk off with a bunch of classified information. No one quite knows exactly what he did with it in terms of, you know, who he might have shown it to. And you have a large swath of the political class claiming it doesn’t really matter, or it never happened, or everybody does it. And so, how hopeful should we really be that, you know, external political threats, and also the threat of climate change can actually get people to buckle down? Get serious and clean up house?

Rob Reich
Yeah, I mean, the climate change example is a good one. And I can add to it, the COVID response, which got immediately polarized as well. And so no, no sense of unity or commonality has emerged from that, you know, political scientists, for better or for worse, often point to widespread military conflict as one of the only potential unifiers in these circumstances. And no rational person could hope for World War as a mechanism for generating depolarization. But the social science suggests that that is one effective mechanism, as I say, not to be hoped for but nevertheless a genuine phenomenon in the past. So you know, instead, I think we try to pin our hopes on once again, the the defeat of Donald Trump in 2024, and the courage of the Republican Party leadership to seriously and successfully confront Trumpism and begin to tack to the middle that would be met by an equal appetite on the Democratic Party side for non Geron to kradic politics and young leaders with a much different mindset than is currently the case at the top of both tickets.

Josh Landy
Do you have any words of optimism for us? In case the worst happens in 2020? forming what if, in fact, a populist slash authoritarian candidate wins the presidency in 2024. And not thinking of anyone in particular? And does some of the things that we’ve been warned that folks are planning. So you know, deploying the insurrection act to quell protests, using the military eliminating the independence of federal agencies using the DOJ to proceed political enemies? It could get really bad really fast. I mean, we could end up in a country looks a little bit like today’s Russia. Do you have any words of comfort? For folks? You know, in case that scenario comes about?

Rob Reich
Well, I mean, I’m not sure these are words of comfort, necessarily, but but, you know, the history of federalism in the US. And in particular, for those of us here in California, I think there will be a dynamic that further cements the blue state Red State phenomenon. And, you know, for those of us in California, there will be all kinds of chest thumping about being the world’s fifth largest economy and with all kinds of talent. And, you know, I would imagine that there would be an effort to try to project a quasi foreign policy from California or other potential blue states that would try to remind the federal government about the importance of states rights and devolving power to local levels. And there will be some success in that. Although, of course, in the extreme, it also risks something nothing less than a civil war.

Josh Landy
That was cheerful. Yeah, exactly. So everyone should moved to California, if this happens is what that’s what you’re saying basically, Rob?

Rob Reich
Well, those those who who fear for the Republic, there would be worse places to be other than California, despite all the doom or ism about San Francisco, in terms of the vibrancy of the economy, and, you know, a sense of sane, leadership and government. California could do a lot worse.

Ray Briggs
Well, Rob, this has somehow been encouraging. Thank you so much for joining us.

Rob Reich
See, can be therapeutic.

Josh Landy
Stanford political scientist Rob Reich, making the case for a relatively bright American future.

Ray Briggs
You can listen to extended versions of all today’s conversations at our website, philosophytalk.org. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and spend your future in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
Now… a man who talks so fast he’s already in the future: it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
When Ken Taylor passed away, he had been working on a manuscript titled FAREWELL TO THE REPUBLIC WE ONCE DREAMED OF, a thoughtful cry of alarm. For this year’s end of the year special, in memory of Ken Taylor, there is so much to parse.   Just this past week, I learned that the favorite candies of hot young Timothee Chalamet, who’s playing Willy Wonka for some reason, are Raisinets, Milk Duds and Junior Mints.  No hand pulled bespoke taffy from Grandma for Tim. Nope.  Candy off the shelf, factory direct.   Old school capitalism marches on, Bidenomics in action.  Back to a time before crypto, hedge funds, AI, and sequels.  Prequels are what’s happening baby.  The old is new again, and yet same as it ever was.  Theaters are dying, movies are resurging.  Recorded music is dying, but Taylor Swift was Time’s person of the year, making conservative men angry, even though Time is not even a magazine any more.  Kissinger died!  And where were the tears of the Woke?  Unpleasantness is still unfolding in Israel.  Around which cancel culture will get you, no matter what you think.  We got bored with Ukraine, even though we weren’t that interested in the first place.  We’ve already forgotten about the Chinese surveillance balloon.  Scared of it once, but I forget why, or when.  Speaking of cancel culture, nepobabies are coming into their own as a thing to whinge about.  Movie stars give birth to supermodels who give birth to influencers.  It’s magical!  Also such notables as the Trump boys, and Hunter Biden, for whom nepotism came with addiction, Republicans eavesdropping on his personal business, tax troubles, and the lurid attention of the allegedly left wing media.  Speaking of which, I just read that Twitter died.  Weeping.  Also, Barbie is real now.  Like Taylor Swift in the rightwing brain, a promiscuous childless aging woman, surrounded by money, and the muffled cries of Kens who did not cut the mustard.  In other news, angry conservatives pointed their smartphones at rainbows and got themselves kicked out of Target.  Just as news came in that the supposed outbreak of organized shoplifting was a nationwide load of hooey.  Conservatives look to slug it out with demons of their own devising- immigrants, antifa, BLM, abortion-seekers, teachers, critical race theory, taxes, regulation, the Constitution, and of course and always, unter Biden.  Heroes are few and far between, especially in the pop culture realm, Kevin Sorbo, James Woods, Kirk Cameron, that guy that used to be on SNL.  Kyle Rittenhouse is the most embarrassing hero.  We were asked to see him as a minute man, riding to the defense of Kenosha with a borrowed rifle in his mom’s car.  He moved to Texas, on track to become a paramedic policeman lawyer spokesmodel.  Not working.  At 20 he’s just another teen drop out.  His book, ACQUITTED, out this month on Kindle, is not doing well.  That’s how things are going.  Conservatives barrel ahead, but all they’re good at is making libs nervous.  After the Civil War, blue and gray internalized and scattered, finally morphing into red and blue.  Thanks media for helpful state by state charts!  In the sixties, what we now call reds ran everything, dialed down, and the blues were dialed up hippies.  What we call stochastic commies today.  But red and blue had shared beliefs.  Conspiracies, for instance.  Lee Harvey Oswald was set up, but was Kennedy killed because he was too liberal, not liberal enough, or he ticked off the Mafia?  Even today.  Right and left agree Epstein was murdered because he knew too much.  About what, though?  Neither side trusts the FBI, who used to spy on hippies making bombs and now spy on soccer moms making death threats to school boards.  Right and left also agree, we don’t hate the Clintons as much as we should.  Other ways that a MAGA is a hippie.  The feed cap with the logo.  Hippies often wear feed caps, but the logo is a marijuana leaf, usually worn by bass players in jam bands.  Maga types not only have the feed caps, they have logo pants, logo jackets, all of it shiny.  You can see them coming three blocks away.  They’re like Nascar drivers who ran out of gas, stuck in Bakersfield after dark.  Same with hippies, back in the day.  All fringe and dayglo and blacklights. Remember when hippies tried to levitate the Pentagon back in 1969?  LSD was involved.  Some hallucinogens might have helped the thwarted maga takeover of January 6.  If they’d levitated the capital with their minds instead of breaking and entering, Woodstock clown Wavy Gravy might be president today. His pre-hippie name was Romney, by the way. Just saying. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area and and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, from subscribers to our online community of thinkers, and from the members of KALW San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
Support for this episode comes from contributors to the Ken Taylor Memorial Fund.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed—

or mis-expressed!

…on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Mitt Romney
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