BONUS — COVID-19 AND DEMOCRACY

(Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.)

Katie DeFiore: Hi there. My name is Katie DeFiore and I am the network manager for the Democracy Group Podcast Network. This is a special episode from the Democracy Group, which the show you are currently listening to is a proud member of. The podcasts in our network strive to uncover what is broken in our democracy and find ways to fix it. To discover all of our shows and learn more about the democracy group, please visit us at democracygroup.org.

Jenna Spinelle: COVID-19 brings together several issues that have long been talked about separately, political polarization, misinformation, international cooperation, democratic norms, institutions and many others. Today we will be diving into those topics and examining the ways that the Coronavirus has impacted democracy locally, nationally and internationally. My name is Jenna Spinelle and I'm one of the hosts of the Democracy Works Podcast, one of the member shows in the Democracy Group Podcast Network. I'm delighted to be joined today by several academics and thought leaders in politics and foreign policy who also happen to be hosts of democracy group podcasts themselves. We've all been covering the Coronavirus individually on our shows and I'm excited to tie some of those threads together in this conversation today. So joining us is Jeremy Suri, Mack Brown distinguished professor in the LBJ school of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and host of This Is Democracy. Jeremy, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Jeremi Suri: Thanks for having me on. I'm excited about this conversation.

Jenna Spinelle: Joining us as well is Weston Wamp, consultant and senior political strategist at Issue One and host of Swamp Stories. Weston welcome.

Weston Wamp: Hey, thanks. It's obviously in this unusual time, fun to meet new people.

Jenna Spinelle: Joining us as well Luke Knittig, senior director of communications at the McCain Institute and host of In The Arena. Luke, thanks for joining us.

Luke Knittig: Thank you Jenna. Wonderful to be with you and to be with everybody.

Jenna Spinelle: And finally Rachel Tausenfreund, editorial director at the German Marshall Fund and one of the hosts of Out of Order. Rachel, thank you for joining us from Berlin today.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun and greetings from Berlin.

Jenna Spinelle: Okay. So I'm going to start off with a round of questions for each of you individually and then we'll expand out to some topics I'm hoping that you can all weigh in on. Jeremy, let's start with you. In a recent episode of this is democracy, you talked about how the political focus in the US for the past generation if not longer, has been on short term conflicts. And I'm wondering how that way of thinking, that mode impacts where we are today and perhaps if you think we're likely to shift out of that mode moving forward as a result of the Coronavirus.

Jeremi Suri: Well, I think you asked one of the key questions about the current state of our democracy and it's something I've done a lot of research on and actually written a few books about too. What you find when you look closely at how elected leaders have been making decisions in the last 20 to 30 years, you find that their timeframe has become more and more constrained and that's due to three factors among others. One is our contemporary media, which puts everyone under a microscope continuously. Second, there's the cycle of fundraising. The need to constantly be out there raising money. And third and perhaps most significant of all, there is just the overwhelming number of issues that political leaders are dealing with. I spent a lot of time looking at how they allocate their time and you find it's reacting to one fire after another.

Jeremi Suri: What happens as a consequence? You're constantly tactically trying to juggle balls and not thinking about the long passes you need to throw to actually win the game. And that's exactly what's happened with Coronavirus. People have been warning of this pandemic exactly in these terms for more than a decade. People from all directions, all parties and politicians have not denied it. They've just been focused on other things. And our hope is that this moment is awakening us not simply to the importance of these longterm issues we've known about that, but to the importance of reorganizing how we construct politics to make more space and more incentive to focus on the longterm. And that's what I hear from my students. So I'm optimistic in those terms and that's why the podcast is a good venue to talk about that.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Great. No, and I think we'll maybe circle back at the end to some of those changes and where we go from here. But always good to start on a positive note. I know some of us in our shows don't always do that necessarily. And-

Rachel Tausenfreund: It's not easy.

Jenna Spinelle: With good reason, which we'll also get to. Yeah. So Weston I want to bring you in here. Jeremy hit on one of the constraints, one of the challenges, one of the reasons we got to this place where we are is because of the increased pressure on lawmakers to always be out there raising money and I know money and politics is one of, if not the main focus of your work at Issue One and on Swamp Stories. So I'm just curious, what role has lobbying and money in politics and those influences played in the US government's response to COVID-19 from what you've seen?

Weston Wamp: Yeah. Well, Jeremy's right. I mean, part of the reason that everything in American politics has become, I think on both sides of the aisle pretty short term, is that the culture in Washington really demands that if you're going to move up the ladder and in a lot of ways, if you're ever going to get there in the first place that you be an effective and forceful fundraiser. And we did an episode talking about if you're around the beltway or inside the beltway or around the swamp, you're familiar with the process that a lot of people call done for dollars. And we broke that down because it's shocking to a lot of people to realize that in the lives of many members of Congress, the first thing that's top of mind, especially in election year is how am I going to raise enough money? And there are these sort of shocking amounts of money that have to be raised weekly, monthly.

Weston Wamp: And so much of even the schedule, the social schedule on the hill is focused around fundraising. And those lobbyists in many cases, those evening gatherings with lobbyists are to cultivate relationships, frankly for moments just like this. You hate to think of a pandemic as being the type of a perfect storm for a lobbyist. But the truth is when both Republicans and Democrats agree, we've got to spend trillions of dollars, that is as much an aligning that lobbyists are waiting for. And that obviously is all encompassing. It paints with a broad brush what all lobbyists are doing. There's good and bad that's revealed in these moments. I mean, lobbying is firmly protected by the first amendment for a good reason. I would argue that part of the reason that small businesses got a big chunk of that $2.2 trillion was because you can imagine there was a very strong small business lobby.

Weston Wamp: On the flip side, a lot of what people resent about Washington I think was on full display. Is it lobbyists? And there were plenty of public reports of this. There were lobbyists from virtually every industry you can imagine that came with their hands out wanting to get in this unusual historic multi-trillion dollar bipartisan moment in Washington. I think the worst of that is probably evidenced by what you see as a followup. I think a good example of industry lobbyists trying to seize the moment would be you take a look at infrastructure and this idea that there might be an infrastructure play as part of a recovery.

Weston Wamp: Well, I mean, even president Obama talked about how shovel-ready is not actually as shovel-ready as it sounds. Right? And because of all the regulatory hurdles, when you greenlight investment in infrastructure, it usually takes years for dirt to move. This is not a scenario where the US economy is likely to need Coronavirus recovery four years from now when you might be building new bridges. But the point is it sure does sound like an interesting time for people in the transportation industry to come forward, lobbyists particularly and ask for their share.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah, no. And that also brings in I think some of the deeper dynamics about that the virus has brought to bear of like the focus on individuals and the people that we care about most immediately, whether it's our family or our industry or our sector and like the broader social contract that we're all trying to uphold. I think we'll maybe come back around and touch on some of that as well. So Luke thinking about the work that the McCain Institute does, I know you focus a lot on what it takes to be a citizen of a democracy to act with leadership and integrity. And so I'm just curious how you guys have been thinking about the virus and the response to it and maybe even some of what Weston and Jeremy have been talking about. It seems like we have a real vacuum or real need right now for some of that values, purpose driven leadership in Washington and in States and really all over the place as everybody comes to grips with the virus.

Luke Knittig: Yeah, I mean it sure seems like a time for courage and character and character driven leadership. Like so many institutes and outfits, we've had to pivot and change how we go about our programs, but they're turning up some interesting maybe data points isn't the right way to put it. But I'll just give you a couple of examples. We have a challenge competition that involves, well it did involve 10 universities, only one fell out after the pandemic kind of scattered students across the country. We call it the Peer To Peer Protective Project. And it's something that Homeland Security used to do that we didn't want to see fall by the wayside. And it's project teams across universities. Johns Hopkins is one of them, Missouri State, Arizona State. But it's them coming up with the right ideas of how you can tamp down online extremism and hate.

Luke Knittig: And they've pivoted because you've seen it whether it's against Asians and you can identify other categories and they're coming up with some interesting ways. So I think at that level, kind of at that peer to peer level, it's important to see that go forward. But clearly at the top of leadership level. Our other initiative that's underway is called We Hold These Truths that's been going for a couple of years. We have worked with Countable, that civic engagement platform out of Silicon Valley, same kind of thing. We really feel it's important to step up now to talk about what's going around the world and the threats and the impingements on human rights and dignity that's happening undercover of COVID.

Luke Knittig: And you see it domestically as well. We have a labor tracker, a visual dashboard if you will, high tech in Texas looking at agricultural laborer violations. And you talk about human dignity and things that we need to be staying right on top of right now. So kind of, yeah, money and people concerned about how to carry forward operations is on a lot of people's mind, but human dignity and what we have in terms of empathy and compassion I'd say is every bit as important as what we have in our, in our reserve funds right now.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. And I think that that issue of human rights, human dignity is going to be so important moving forward as we try to figure out, I know there's talks about how are we going to track people who have COVID or who may have it? And there's all kinds of like technological solutions being proposed to that, but people are concerned about all types of issues there. We can maybe come back around to that. But we've been talking about the US mostly thus far. And I want to bring in Rachel for a bit of an international perspective. You and your colleagues at GMF have been doing great work covering how countries throughout Europe and throughout the rest of the world are responding to COVID-19 and also about transatlantic cooperation. And I wanted to maybe start your portion of our conversation there. To what extent has there been transatlantic cooperation in the COVID-19 response and then how are European countries working together? What is the EU doing? I think in the US we tend to get in our own little bubble. So please help us see how things are happening elsewhere in the world.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Sure. Happy to help. I mean, the short answer is there's not a lot of transatlantic in this particular crisis. It was in fact, it's really striking. I've been living in Europe for almost 20 years now and I think this is the first crisis, European crisis that I've experienced where no one is actually asking for US help. There isn't even the expectation that it might be coming, which this was different with even the crisis around the large influx of Syrian refugees in 2015. Even then, Europeans were sort of expecting the US would help somehow. This time, it's just been absent for a number of reasons that we might get to. But it's strikingly absent. NATO albeit belatedly has started to do a few things delivering supplies and stuff, but it's a completely different ball game than any of the crises that have come before.

Rachel Tausenfreund: And in terms of Europe, I mean I'll try to sum it up because there's a lot going on. But I would say there also hasn't been a lot of European cooperation, a lot less than you would have hoped for. And there are two main reasons for that. One is the specific and one is structural. So the specific one is what Jeremy said at the very beginning, right? Leaders are sort of putting out fires. Well in Europe when COVID was kind of making its way into Europe, they were dealing with another fire which was again refugees at the Turkish and Greek border. And this was the main thing that in European capitals and in the European commission they were really worried about and this stretched into March. And so they just didn't have the right kind of bandwidth to focus on the Coronavirus developments.

Rachel Tausenfreund: The second element is structural, which is to say the European commission has really limited powers when it comes to health policy. This is not one of the areas of policy that has been sort of centralized. So they can recommend things, they can try to make plans. But in the end they're just recommending and all the stuff they can do is voluntary. So those were both problems. And then in addition to that, everyone's reaction in the beginning was very nation state driven. The capitals made decisions, they made decisions about their people. There was border checking. There was export bans on medical supplies. It was a pretty ugly moment for European cooperation. Not that dissimilar to the US in some ways. Right?

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Yeah. I was just sitting here thinking about some of the conflicts we're seeing play out between the US federal government and state government. It seems to me many similar things in Europe. Actually on that point of government cooperation, we are seeing increasing rifts between the Trump administration and state governors. We're seeing states form these little compacts, one in The Northeast, one on the West coast. And we're also seeing conflicts with people taking to their state houses to protest and trying to advocate for getting their state's economy back open and getting people back to work. I'm wondering what you guys make of some of those developments as they've been playing out. I should mention we are recording this on April 16th. So who knows where we'll be. This comes out in like a week or so, but what do you make of what we're seeing as those various lines of conflict play out?

Weston Wamp: Well, I think we have to be careful when we talk about those who are ostensibly protesting the shelter at home orders and things of that sort. There's clear evidence that many people are concerned about the effects these orders have on the economy. But there's not a lot of evidence that a lot of people are protesting that. It's just small organized group of people in various locations. So those who appeared at the Michigan Capitol I believe earlier this week, it was a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people. That's not insignificant, but that's hardly representative of a state of multiple millions of citizens. Most evidence is that most citizens, if they can, are trying to do what they can to physically distance themselves from others. Some people don't have a choice and that's why minority communities and poor communities have been hit harder. But people are generally in the United States and as far as I can tell in Europe are generally trying to shelter themselves and recognize the seriousness of this issue.

Jeremi Suri: I think we represent all of us a different part of the country or the world. Part of what I have marveled at in the last month is we are living through a really like a great political science. What would normally be like a civics lesson in federalism or our form of government. I mean a lot of this is sort of theoretical until you begin to really learn in real time how important your mayor and your governor and the president are in their own lanes. And I'll say this, I mean when you begin to shut the country down, which is really almost unconscionable. We wouldn't have ... these are not things you normally think about. When you begin to do that for the reasons that we have, I think in hindsight it was relatively orderly and everybody going into a social distancing, it looks different if you live in a single family home maybe than an apartment.

Jeremi Suri: But the process of going into that lockdown looks pretty much the same everywhere. I think the reason that you will see more and more conflict as we begin to debate how we come out of it is that for example, I live in Hamilton County Tennessee, population 370,000. Yesterday, April 15th, there was one new Coronavirus case, positive test case. Knox County, Tennessee, which is the home to University of Tennessee, a couple hours North of here, population 450,000 had two new cases yesterday. So you're coming up on a period of time where even though people in the state of Tennessee have sheltered in place, if that's the terminology you want to use, they've done the social distancing thing. They're going to begin to get pretty anxious because what they're seeing in their community doesn't square with what they see on national TV at night and they're not feeling nearly the same pressing health concern that they may be feeling in terms of their economic wellbeing.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm seeing. So I'm in state college, Pennsylvania, also a college town where our campus is mostly empty right now. So yeah, we're also seeing one or two new cases a day, but Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, so the more urban areas in Pennsylvania, it's a very different picture. So thinking about the challenges these governors have of putting policies in place that impact an entire state or I'm sure it's the same Rachel in Europe, if you're trying to put together and put in place policies that impact entire countries or nation states below that. But yeah, you still have that kind of urban rural shift and how that's all playing out.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yeah, sure.

Jenna Spinelle: Weston I wanted to actually follow up. So I've been thinking a lot about Congress as well. So we've seen this like conflict between the president and governors have certainly risen to prominence, where's Congress in all this? I mean, if you're a US rep, maybe to a lesser extent a Senator, are you feeling like you're kind of getting left behind right now? Or how do kind of make your mark or keep yourself out there, especially if you're up for reelection in November?

Weston Wamp: Isn't that fascinating? I started talking about that weeks ago. I penned an op-ed in my hometown newspaper. And I wrote basically the people are about to get a real crash course in who's got real power and who doesn't. I grew up the son of a member of Congress who served for 16 years. And so there's the perception of power there, but in the middle of a pandemic you realize that your local Congressman doesn't have a very big staff and doesn't have hardly any authority. And I do think that's kind of tough for members of Congress given that the nature of the public health crisis in a lot of ways prevents Congress from even doing its business normally. All right. They're scared to convene in Washington. And I think it's interesting, I think the members of Congress who are left with the most significant power in this unusual moment are the ones who have their own large and potentially even national social media followings. Right?

Weston Wamp: It's not based on their constitutional role unfortunately. I mean you've seen the kind of constant, I think this is a bipartisan comment, the pretty consistent degradation, weakening of the role of the legislative branch in our former government over many years, if not decades. Well now it's like exacerbated by this very unusual crisis that we're all living through. And I do think I was watching a press conference locally where the governor flew into town, the governor speaks, the County mayor spoke, the city mayor spoke and the Congressman who was standing behind him was never even given the opportunity to speak.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy to think about. Yeah. I mean how you capture that oxygen that's just increasingly been sucked out of the room. So I know you guys will be keeping an eye on that for sure. Maybe you can have him all on your podcast Weston. That can be their platform-

Weston Wamp: Well, in all seriousness, we've had an easier time booking members of Congress who we had been trying to get interviews with because I think to a large extent, I think they're kind of twiddling their thumbs. I mean they're on calls. I think speaker Pelosi is organizing calls for Dr. Fauci and others to brief members of Congress. But there is not the same responsibility falling on them that there are our local elected officials.

Luke Knittig: Well, I would just jump in. I mean, I think you're right folks that have the big social media following, but folks that have big money too, right? You see Bill Gates and his wife stepping out in a big way. And I guess you have Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, I mean that's out there. And then kind of the counter to that, people that kind of scratch their head and say, "Gosh, there are folks with billions and billions. What should they be doing in this besides maybe riding it out on their yacht in the middle of the med?"

Jenna Spinelle: Right. Rachel, so we've been talking about some of the kind of response people throughout the US are starting to get anxious, starting to want to get back to work, get out of the house, going stir crazy. Are we seeing some of that same type of activity happening in Europe as well?

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yes, definitely. There have also been here in Germany, a couple small demonstrations recently that were broken up with people complaining about or worried about what's happening to our sort of fundamental rights. And in Germany there's this ... because of the history of world war II, you have a kind of leftist movement that's very, very aware of government overreach, maybe too aware sometimes, but there's a kind of active core there of leftist movement. So you've seen that. I was at the park the other day and someone was walking holding a sign saying like what about our freedoms? Stuff like this. But in general, there hasn't been a lot of kind of broad scale civil disobedience and in Germany and most places in Germany. So Germany is also federal. I always say not quite as federal as the US in terms of, they think they're very federal, but it's a lot more aligned than policies between states in the US. They hate it when I say that, but I repeat it often.

Rachel Tausenfreund: And so you have, but in terms of the strictness of the stay at home or social distancing, it's different. And so Berlin, it's a little more relaxed. And people are allowed to kind of hang out in groups of two in the parks and things like that. Whereas in other places in Germany or for example in France, I have a colleague in Paris and they of course have pretty small apartments and they're really stuck inside. You have to fill out a form if you want to go outside at all. And nonetheless, it's gone really pretty smoothly I would say in pretty much across Europe. Even if you think about Italy in places where people have been in quarantine, pretty strict quarantine for quite a long time. The level of kind of civic obedience and a feeling of societal responsibility, that's been pretty striking.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah, and that's interesting too because you brought up France. I know that there is this culture of protest there, right? I mean, think about the yellow vests that have been out for much of the past year. I mean, but there hasn't really been that type of response to COVID-19. And even thinking about some of the issues of economic inequality. I can imagine people that had yellow vests on this time last year might also be pretty fired up about some of those issues that the virus has brought to bear.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yeah, definitely. I mean, one thing one has to say in an American context is of course in terms of welfare state and a kind of safety net to catch these people, there's no comparison. Right? There's existing structures. In any case, the most states were also pretty quick to do different kinds of supports. So everything's a little less dramatic and France being a good example. I mean, they very quickly said rents don't need to be paid. No one could be evicted. All of these kinds of things that you wouldn't even think about in the States. That certainly helps. But yeah, I mean, if you think about a place like France and even just six months ago, the kind of process that were going on, everybody knows, and Italy is close, right? Italy and Spain are ... That's close to home and things were quite dramatic. So or still are really. So people have a sense of responsibility.

Jenna Spinelle: Right, right. So Luke, we were talking earlier about bipartisan collaboration that happened on as a result of getting the stimulus bill passed or the bipartisan collaboration necessarily to get the stimulus passed. I'm wondering, and I know that that was something that Senator McCain often tried to do and his work was work across the aisle. Do you think that in this new kind of political reality we find ourselves in, there is an opportunity for more bipartisan collaboration? Jeremy, you may want to weigh in on this as well, or even Weston or are we just going to kind of go back to the way things were and being super polarized once the dust all settles from this, whenever that might be.

Luke Knittig: Well, I'm an eternal optimist. So I think truly we can find a common ground. I'll put in a plug for one of my upcoming podcast, I talk to Bruce Bond from the common ground committee. And we had a good discussion about what that means right now in this moment. And then I think you can find a common ground. The McCain Institute just brought on Mark Green from USA to be our executive director and that's a real hallmark of his career. So you have leaders like that out there that know how to do this.

Luke Knittig: And I think with all of us with more time or certainly attention to understand some of the underlying aspects of the things right in front of us, like how are we going to hold an election in November? How should we hold elections going forward? How should testing work? I mean, I think that there are things that you frame them right, you're going to have to find a common ground. So I'm an optimist about it. It's pretty easy to go the other way and pointing out folks who want to politicize it in a negative way. But I'm an optimist about it.

Jeremi Suri: I agree with that. I think we're seeing a lot of evidence of issues that had divided people now bringing them together. You still have partisanship. In fact, that process might encourage more short term partisanship from those who were vestiges of the old order if I might say so. So take the recent election in Wisconsin. Well, what I think you saw there were those in power trying to restrict the vote because of their fear for where that vote was going. But what you saw in the voting was actually not necessarily a commitment to one party or another, but a commitment to problem solving. And I think we're that also in Washington for all the money and other interests that divide people and create incentives for this partisanship at the surface level. Look at what happened in the last bill.

Jeremi Suri: I mean, you had Republicans and Democrats agreeing on a stimulus package that was unthinkable, unthinkable under president Obama, right? Whether it was the right package or not, we can debate, but it's extraordinary how much they actually agreed on. It's going to be very hard for the next year or two to be someone who's against good government for someone who wants to drain the swamp. If you want to drain the swamp in the next year or two, you want to deal with the stuff outside of government that's harming the use of government itself. But is anyone really against the government helping with healthcare? Is anyone really against the government helping those who are unemployed? Those positions now have become common positions. And so I agree with Luke. I think we're going to see a generation of politicians playing to that space. And maybe in 10, 20 years we'll be complaining that there's too much consensus. We do tend to go in these cycles in our history.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Weston, did you have anything you wanted to share there? You're talking with folks a lot as you were just saying earlier.

Weston Wamp: Well, I appreciate those two guys who are both smarter and probably better credentialed than I am. My fear is that we just use a legitimate once in a century crisis to point the finger. And I fear that that will only accelerate into November. And frankly, the allegations, what normally are political accusations and allegations that have some limits. I mean, in this scenario, those accusations are about causing people to die. I hope that we can come to a consensus in the summer months that this was just a lot more complex than can easily be blamed on anyone. Mayor, governor, president, prime minister, government head around the world. And that's not to give a pass at all, but that's my fear is that this thing could tilt in the direction where I think particularly if supporters of the president for example, feel like down the stretch, there is this effort to lay at the president's feet the death numbers from the Coronavirus, it could exacerbate quickly the partisan tempers of the people.

Weston Wamp: And I think it's unknown how members of Congress are going to react by the time that they get to come back in a sense take the helm again because they are largely left out of this. But if you look at some of the predominant voices, I think the two, and I might be a little biased, but to me your prevailing voices in Congress right now are both freshmen and they both have really unusual paths to Congress. And it's Dan Crenshaw from Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York. And those two haven't come off of their quite partisan and well articulated positions at all in the middle of this. I mean, if anything, I think they have like found ample ammunition to use towards the other side. And so I do think that is a bit concerning.

Jeremi Suri: If I could just come in on this because I think it's a great comment from Weston. I really, really appreciate it. It adds a lot and it actually reinforces I think the point that Luke and I were making. These are two sides of the same coin, which is to say that you are in the short run going to see perhaps more partisan rhetoric, but that doesn't mean that the country is moving in a more partisan way. And that's why I referred to the Wisconsin election. And the historical analogy here would be the analogy to Herbert Hoover. Okay. When you're president of the United States, Democrat or Republican, you own the state of the economy. The most accurate predictor of reelection for any president is economic growth and unemployment. Second most is the number of deaths in war, right? Or number of deaths as in our moment now. You own that.

Jeremi Suri: And so of course that's going to be made into partisan hay. Of course people are going to on both sides, try to assert blame. Herbert Hoover tried to blame other people for the depression of 1929 to '32 when he was president, right? So that's going to be there. But you can at the same time have people coming together saying that we have common problems we need to solve. We might not all agree on who's to blame, but we want new people in there who we think can solve those problems. And that's what if you look at the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the shift in the country that occurred then, it's not that overnight people became Democrats. It's not that the Democrats won the argument.

Jeremi Suri: It's that they believe that those who are in power, who happen to be Republicans and much of the country, that they were not managing the situation well and they wanted a new set of leaders and that gave them a clear consensus agenda to deal with the problems of the economy at that time. I predict or hope based on that historical perspective that we'll see a new generation of political actors, maybe some of the people Weston discussed, focusing on these common longterm problems, which will bring people together even as they remain Ds and Rs. But of course, it will create a churn in November in who's elected and who's not elected.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Yeah. That's a super interesting perspective. I like how you combine the history, like past, present, future, all in two minutes Jeremy. That was great. So Rachel, we've seen some of these same forces at play in Europe with the rise of populist parties and movements from certainly Brexit to Italy, Germany. We've seen some of these dynamics play out. How might the virus and the response to it impact some of those dynamics?

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yeah, it's a complicated picture I would say. So I'll start with the dark gloomy first which came to mind earlier when Luke was being optimistic, which was great. But if you're in Europe then you think about Hungary, Poland and a little less well known Bulgaria. So Hungary passed I think about a week ago, legislation sort of under the guise of emergency powers to fight, to react to the Coronavirus. That's really just turning the country into some kind of sham democracy autocracy, right? It's taking away all kinds of powers from the opposition, from the media, things like that. And one of my colleagues, he's Hungarian and he was talking about, I mean if you wanted to be generous, then you would just look and say, "Oh, maybe they're really emergency powers."

Rachel Tausenfreund: But if you look at the things they did right away with these powers, it was things like cut funding. Because in Europe we have public funding mostly for elections and they cut public funding for elections. Well, who does that benefit? Of course not the opposition. It benefits the party that already is in power, has access to the press, things like that. So it's a clear and blatant and dangerous undermine of democracy in the guise of emergency response Poland's supposed to have an election in May and very likely the people in the party in power is going to push forward somehow with this election. And the opposition is very worried that that's an unfair situation in which to be in the opposition and trying to win an election. So you definitely see some worrying tendencies of parties in power using this to undermine democracy.

Luke Knittig: Rachel, I'm going to jump in real quick because I couldn't agree with you more. We have a-

Rachel Tausenfreund: Oh no, we're both pessimists now.

Luke Knittig: Well, I'm going to go the other way. I mean, we have 50 next generation leaders and we have leaders we keep up with in all the countries that you mentioned. I think of one that I interviewed on my podcast just months ago who's in Hungary. And her objective is to try to bring better education to the Roma there and think of the kind of environment you're describing and how that affects her work. So I think that's absolutely something we need to focus on. The bigger question there, right? For the first time, from what I read or have smarter people than me tell me, authoritarian governments have more wealth than democratic governments. Now, got to look at the balance books now, look at the books now. But think about that. The promise of prosperity, some would argue is that the balance is shifting there.

Luke Knittig: I agree. I think we've got to be laser focused on that. And then places that are trying their best. We haven't even talked about Africa. Look at South Africa and countries that are doing some pretty good things in this pandemic and we've got to make sure we're not forgetting about them. And I think that goes to what American democracy and leadership has got to project and do. And I hope we get back a point where we I'm sure we do care, but where we understand and see what we can do a little bit beyond our own shorts as well even as we got to do all the things we got to do at home.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yeah. But no, I completely agree with that. All of that's very important. And then just to sort of spin it away from the total pessimistic picture. You are also seeing in other countries maybe more heartening results at least in the early stage. I mean, the problem is the real economic impact. Right now we're in sort of immediate lifesaving crisis response, which tends to awaken different things in a society. So these are results now. I'm not sure what the results will be in six months or 10 months. But in for example Germany, you have now the sort of center left and center right parties who are currently in government are climbing in the polls and Germany's novel far right party. You know, Germany didn't have a far right party in the parliament until recently. Their numbers are dropping, right?

Rachel Tausenfreund: So people are ... I mean by most accounts, Germany is handling the crisis pretty well. The death rates are lower than in other countries. And people are seeing that, reacting to that and understanding that they do care about experience, do care about government working and they are a little less willing at the moment at least to be kind of just screw the people in power voting, right? This is the potential change that we're seeing right now that could be really good for democratic systems and rules and order and things like that. When it's clear what the stakes are, people's willingness to kind of do a protest vote seem to be sinking. Now again, this is the short term picture. I hope it stays the same. I'm not sure.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Jeremy, did you want to jump in there?

Jeremi Suri: Well, I did because I think it echoes and summarizes beautifully a lot of what we've talked about. Much of our politics over the last four to five years has been an argument between an establishment that wants to protect the status quo and a group on the right more often than not, but sometimes on the left that's argued that we need to destroy all these existing institutions. We need to be disruptors. And what we've come to at this moment is that we need competence. We need people who can get things done back to where we were before. If we're going to reopen our society, we need competent people who can assess where it's safe and how this can be safely done. And in the case of Germany, which I also follow relatively closely, it's really interesting how angle America has become popular again. And so this sort of commitment and interest in good governance, I think is something we can really build on. And that's something we try to build energy on in our podcast.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, who's more competent than a physicist? Right. When you see her talking about like the exponential numbers, you're like, "Okay, here's someone who knows what she's talking about when she's getting into exponential numbers." It makes an impact.

Jeremi Suri: Yeah. And to think about the ways in which I know there are some people who don't like Dr. Fauci, bu he has become in many ways the voice of the federal government. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Jerry Powell at the federal reserve. I mean for the last five to 10 years, the Republican party and some Democrats were condemning the federal reserve as being this sort of bastion of elite economists, right? Now the federal reserve has become the world's banker and they're doing things that many people thought they shouldn't do four or five years ago, that it's too much power they've taken on. They're basically providing credit to the entire world. I haven't heard a single federal politician and very few state politicians criticize that today. We're happy to have their confidence.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah, sure. And we talk a lot on our show too about this whole kind of depth of expertise and how this might be an opportunity to bring some of that back around. So we only have a few minutes left here. I want to start to wrap up. So one of the things I think has been evident from this conversation, but if it hasn't, will be evident once everyone goes and listens to all these other great shows or everyone's shows. One thing that's common among all of our podcasts is that they focus on what's broken in democracy and how we can fix it. So we've touched on some of this already, but maybe just as a kind of closing thought here, what are you guys keeping an eye on? What do you think is like maybe the most urgent issue from where you sit or where your organization sits that we kind of need to be thinking about as it pertains to the virus and democracy moving here from spring into summer and on down the road?

Jeremi Suri: Well, I'll start because it's something we've been talking about in our last few episodes. The two things I look at most as a historian and also as an observer of contemporary politics, are we seeing people come into office or those in office convert from being those who are trying to exploit the existing institutions to those who are trying to reform them? Is there a pragmatic problem solving that takes over? Because I think that is where the pragmatic consensus is also, it's around problem solving. And then second, are we seeing new energy and new mobilization around that? Are we seeing not just those in office but those outside of office being mobilized? Are we seeing new money even if it's micro-financing going into those kinds of efforts? And in Austin Texas and in many of the places where we live, this sort of energy and innovation has been in the business sector for years. I'm looking to see that move into the public sector. I want that talent, that energy and that kind of capital to be driving how we think about our societies and our democracies going forward.

Weston Wamp: I think what we've been relatively obsessed by and obsessed with at Issue One for the last few weeks is the question of how are we ... and a lot of times like in this, and I think in Austin, you'll appreciate the comparison. The world really stood still in East Tennessee when there was a first mention that college football may not be played. That's the point at which like the Coronavirus got more serious than just a public health issue. But in all seriousness, it actually calls the question of a much more important American tradition this fall. And that is how are we going to hold safe elections, right? I mean, depending on people's political persuasion, they may have different opinions in peace time about how we can better expand access to voting. But this is a full blown emergency that is thrust upon us and it's happening on the eve of a very consequential national election.

Weston Wamp: And I don't think here in April, we can overstate the potential chaos. And it's not politically viable that the federal government step in and dictate what happens. And so we've got to make sure that states are paying attention and funded and that once each state makes its moves in terms of adding flexibility, expanding early voting, expanding absentee voting, that there's then a pretty wholesome, I mean, certainly an all encompassing public information campaign so that everybody can vote. Because the nightmare, and there may be multiple, but the nightmare is that the election is effectively contested.

Weston Wamp: And I think one of the things that is really important for the best leaders among us to talk about and talk about consistently in the months to come is that we are not going to know, in my opinion, who the next president is within days. And it might even take a couple of weeks of election day. And I think we just need to prepare everybody that that's normal. Only this time that's going to happen. It's unavoidable and it's okay. We've got to keep our wits about us in a really, again, really strange and unusual time.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. And to that point that we were talking about earlier, trusting the experts, trusting the officials who are in charge of running and encountering these things to yeah believe their process and what they're doing. We've also been concerned about that on our show and our work in the McCourtney Institute. We had an episode of our show with Charles Stuart from MIT who has been doing a lot of work in this area. Literally I think he took a break between hopping on calls with various state election officials to talk with us. But there is a big effort out there that I know Issue One and lots of other groups are working on to try to shore things up between now and November. Luke, Rachel, what are you guys about as we move forward?

Luke Knittig: A focus for us kind of lost in the midst of all this is the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service came out with their big 250 page report. The fact that they recommended that women should be part of selective service to be eligible to be drafted made some news. But we're focused on how do you inspire and bring forward more pathways for service? We have a virtual summit we're doing with ASU that'll have a number of the commissioners. Congressmen and women seem very interested in that and I think the title kind of gives it away. It's meeting the moment, the next generation of public service. And I think now is the time to really go to work on that.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. Yeah. To that point of what Jeremy was saying earlier, right? We need those new leaders. We need that kind of new crop to step forward. Rachel, what about you? What's German Marshall Fund doing? I know you just launched a series of post pandemic or kind of what comes next? So what's on your radar?

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yeah, exactly. So we were always sort of, we also focus a lot on democracy but also the international structures around democracy and democracy globally and cooperation and the structures that support it. So we'll continue to have that kind of focus. But indeed we did a kind of spin off of our normal podcasts that the first episode just went live today called post pandemic order. Really focusing in on how are we dealing with this, what are the sort of geo strategic implications and what follows? And our first interview, this is a sort of interview focused podcast was with Senator Chris Murphy and I mean I definitely recommend it and it's interesting because it wraps up so many of the elements that we talked about here.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Because he talks about US leadership or lack of the kind of US leadership that we've had before in these kinds of global crises. He talked about what it means for democracies and democracies internationally. And so it's a really good conversation with my colleague Julie Smith. And we're going to do more of that. We're going to have a former EU commissioner I think in our next episode who's going to talk to us about the EU level and probably also the global level seen from the EU and economies, all kinds of things like that. So we're really going to focus in on that and continue our normal conversations.

Jenna Spinelle: That's great. Looking forward to hearing those. I want to give everybody else here one last chance to plug your podcasts. Are there either episodes that you recommend folks check out if there may be new hearing about your show for the first time from this episode or anything you have coming up that's particularly exciting that folks should be on the lookout for?

Luke Knittig: I'll jump in real quick. I think journalism, right? And freedom of the press. Peter Copeland, a long time news bureau chief with Scripps Howard, global journalists. Our podcast is just out there talking about what it takes to produce quality journalism and I encourage people to check it out.

Jenna Spinelle: Yeah. So important today. And we didn't even get to talk about the media today, but that's a whole other impact on this. And it's something very near and dear to my heart. And actually it's already been cut and is being cut even more so here. So definitely we'll check that out.

Jeremi Suri: Well, and on This Is Democracy, we've actually gone to two episodes a week now rather than just one episode a week. And what we're trying to do is alternate between the hopeful and the not so hopeful. And we had for example, last week we had actually a discussion of humor. How does one bring humor into this? Why do we need humor? And we paired that with a discussion with Adam Tooze about the global economic implications, how we think about this moment, putting the world in this economic coma and how we come out of that. This week we paired a conversation with one of the leaders of the New York Police Department who actually talked very positively about how citizens around New York city have reacted with a discussion of globalization that we'll be posting actually just today on April 16th on how globalization is threatened by the world we're in. And so we're really trying to show both sides and we're trying to bring out the arts as well. Every episode has a poem designed to try to get us all to see beyond our four walls if we can.

Jenna Spinelle: Great. Weston, we'll give you the last word. If you have anything Swamp Stories related that folks should check out.

Weston Wamp: So our most recent episode of Swamp Stories is relevant indirectly to the Coronavirus moment because of the allegations that Senator Richard Burr and others dumped stock shortly after a briefing that in which members of the US Senate were given classified information regarding the spread of the virus. And it just opens up what's always been a very fascinating topic for me. And that is as a former business guy and a guy who grew up around the Congress, a lot of people don't realize that our insider trading laws in America, first of all, are among our most serious white collar laws. We don't mess around. But they also are just totally inadequate to address the conflicts of interest unique to members of Congress. They just don't work. And so we dive into that.

Weston Wamp: I actually had my dad back. He was on our first episode. He came back. He is no Saint, but he in 16 years in Congress, refused to ever deal with that conflict of interest. And so he never directly owned a security or traded one. And so he likes to call balls and strikes on that subject. And we basically just unpackaged it. You don't even actually have to have legislation. I mean, this could be dealt within house and Senate rules. But it's just, even the Jim Cramers of the financial world, it's like every time we have one of these reminders of the conflicts of interest that members of Congress face, it's shocking to a lot of people in the public and even in the financial that members of Congress can trade stocks. There's really nothing keeping them from it. And even beyond that, they can serve on the boards of companies. And this is all just ripe for undermining public trust in a moment where we need it more than ever.

Jenna Spinelle: Exactly. Very well put. I think that's a good note to end on Weston. Thank you all. Once again, we've been speaking with Jeremy Suri from This Is Democracy, Weston Wamp from Swamp Stories, Luke Knittig from In The Arena and Rachel Tausenfreund from Out Of Order. Thank you all so much for taking time to do this today.

Luke Knittig: Great to be part of it.

Rachel Tausenfreund: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

HOW TO LISTEN